CORNELL U N Jn V E R S I T Y LIBRARY Dr. Morris Tenenbaum Judaica Fund CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 3 1924 096 083 393 The original of tiiis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924096083393 A Short History of the Hebrew Text Phonttiplao*] J y. WJjry ^ vr^l =qi^5 ^ ly// X (Til ,9 ^ J . ^ w=LY |i ^ 1 -fn^A^ljjfSx^^.yyf Yfl =i,1<»w a^^^ y/fyi ^>»^ 'Tt^'^ vv-<;^.=l4:^yS.xV0/ijfYr4' ^^"'^^y/ ■|:s^W'i'i'<^«^97y^=»'<-'^rry-FY"i*=^'?^irH^!f>' z o?Ly*i jij r-t^^ $> /; f I +^ t^ ^ ^7. (./y^X^j Hxl,5>' >ft/ XV- THE MOABITB STONE. A SHORT HISTORY OP THE HEBREW TEXT OF THK OLD TESTAMENT IIY THOMAS H. WEIH, B.D. AMIatAHT TO PROrEnnOR OK ORIRNTAL LANGUAORH IN THE UHIVEBHITY OF GLAflDDW SECOND EDITION WITH AN AITKNDIX, lilllLKKiltAPH Y AND rNDKX \ I LONDON WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 14 HENRIETTA ST., COVKNT GAUDEN 1907 I i ROBERTS LIBRARY SouthwesUrn Baptist Saminaty PREFACE. The following pages would not have seen the light bat for the fact that there is no precisely similar (Composition, going over the same grotmd, in existence. The object aimed ait has been to trace the growth of the Hebrew text from its beginning until it reaches the form in which it appears to the reader of a modem printed Hebrew Bible. It has been sought to explain everything which meets the eye on the printed page, or to indicate where such explanation may be i%adily found. In putting these page(s together, I have especially tio acknowledge my indebtedness to the Rev. Professor James Robertson, D.D. not only for indicating where the best sources of information on the various points were to be obtained, but also for carefully revising the proof-sheets; and also to the Rev. Professor Dickson, IV PEEFACE. LL.D., for reading a proof and suggesting many im- provements. The works which have been most freely used are Canon Taylor's The Alphabet, the introduction to Canon DriTer's Notes on the Hebrew Text of the Books of Samud, Dr. Ludwig Blau's Masoretische Untersuchungen and Zur Einleitung in die heUige Schrifl, and, for the last chapter, Dr. Ginsburg's Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. In regard to the plates, that of the Codex Baby- lonicus (p. 128) has been executed by Mr. James Hyatt, London; and that of the Carpentras Stele (p. 16) at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, with the permission of the authorities of the British Museum and of the Delegates of the Press. I have to express my indebted- ness to the Rev. Canon Taylor for kindly offering, and to his publishers, Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner and Company, for consenting, to lend the dicMs for the Baal Lebanon Liscription and Turin Papyrus (p. 7). The electros for the Hebrew Manuscript, British Museum, Oriental 4445 (p. 126), for the Siloam In- scription (p. 9) and for the set of Jewish Coins were supplied by Messrs. Wm. Collins, Sons and Company, Glasgow; and those of the Tell el Hesy Tablet (p. 4) by the Palestine Exploration Fund. The History of the Hebrew Text of the Old Testa- h. PEEFACE. '' ment is an extremely interesting one. The following pages give only the barest outline. Perhaps the sub- ject will be taken up and dealt with as it deserves by more capable hands. Glasgow, 1899. T. H. W. CONTENTS. Notes on the Plates Pogu XI CHAPTER I. BARLIB8T FOBH OV WBITIHO IN IBEAEL. 1. Invention of Alphabetic WriUng. 9. Before the Settle- ment in Canaan. 3. References to Writing in the", Old Testament 4. Intcriptions dated after the Settlement in Canaan. 6. Orthography of the Period 1— H CHAPTER II. THB TWO HEBBKW BCBEPTS. 1. The Old Hebrew Alphabet 2. Arameean Scripts. 8. Orthography of the Period. 4. The New Hebrew Cha- racter. 6. Inscriptions in New Hebrew Character. 6. Sum- mary. 7. Writing Materials 11—22 CHAPTER III. THB OHANQB OF BCBIPT. 1. Varioni Theories. 2. The Change in the Law. 8. In tiie Other Books. 4. Evidence of Ln. B. Evidence of Text Itself. 6. Conclusion 23-34 CHAPTER IV. THB PBBBBBVATION OF THB TEXT. 1. Internal Conditions. 2. External Circumstances. 3. The Lxi Version 84—41 vm CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. P«gu SESOBIFTION OF TEXT OE FIB8T OKNTDBT. 1. Purely ConsonantaL 2. Word-Separation. 3. Other Break! in the Text 4. The Final FormB of Letters. 6. Origin of Final Letters. 6. Talmadio Reference to Final Letter*. 7. Conclusion. 8. The Vowel-Letters. 9. Anomalous Forms. 10. The Dotted Words. 11. Their Antiquity. 12. List of Passages. 13. The Inverted Nuns. 14. Large and Small Letters. 16. Suspended Letters and Divided Nun. 16. Abbreviations. 17. Sum- mary 41—71 CHAPTER VI. ALTERATION OF OBIQINAIi DOOUMENTB. A. Intentional Alteration. 1. mrr and ^P3 2. Euphemistic Expressions. 3. The TiqqAn Soferim or 'Correction of the Scribes.' 4. The 'IttAr Soferim. B. Unintentional Alteration of Original Documents: Classification of Scribal Errors. 1. Failures to understand the Sense. 2. Erron due to tli0 Eye. 3. Errors due to the Ear. 4. Failure of Memory. 6. Errors due to Carelessness or Ignorance. 6. Conclusion 71—88 CHAPTER Vn. PB00SEB8 OF BI8T0BT OF TEXT DDBINa FIBBT BETEN OHSISTIAN OENTCBIBS. 1. All Study of the Text vras Oral. 2. The Text not always Bead as Written. 3. Means to Preserve the Text . . 88—93 CHAPTER VIII. DITJBION OF TEXT. 1. Verses. 2. Sections of the Law. 3. The Haftarahs. 4. The Poetical Books and Passages. 6. Number, Order and Names of the Books 93—100 TV CONTENTS. ^-* Pages CHAPTER IX. THE TOOAIilZATlON OF THE TEXT. 1. The Antiquity of the Points. 2. The Upper Limit 8. The Lower Limit 4. The Probable Date. 5. Various Systems. 6. Various Recension CHAPTER X. THE FALE8TINIAN 8TBTEM. 1. The Living Language. 2. The Consonants^ 3. Dagesh Forte. 4. The Vowels. B. Summary. 6. The ^<>'''>^\^_^^^ 7. Peculiar Pointings CHAPTER XI. THE UABBOBAH. 1. Definition of the Term. 2. The Qris and Sevirs. 8. Other Parts of the Massorah ^^^ CHAPTER XIL MANUBOBIPTB AND PEINTBD TEXTS. 1. Manuscripts. 2. Printed Editions. 3. The Chapters. ^^^^ 4. Clausulae Massoreticse 143 Index of Scripture Texts NOTES ON THE PLATES. THE MOABITB STONE. The following are the transliteration and translation of the first six lines. The dotted letters are doubtful. a |.nmpa.»D3^nKt .nnan MyK\ pan .inw.^n DVlWB' .Vaa .>3Kin.'oi.i3^on.^ao."'ij?trn.''a.VB' Ka,tMDa.«ia«n ."'3.)an.iD\aK0.n« .wy^.^N-i»vi^o.' .noK .nD"0|aKD .n«.i3j;K.Kn.DJ."io«^i.n3a.nD^n^i|n3 I am Mesha the son of Chemoshgad king of Moab, the Dibonite. My father was king over Moab thirty years, and I reigned after my father. And I made this high-place to Che- mosh in Q-r-h-h because he saved me from all the kings, and because he made me to look upon all those that hated me. Omri was king of Israel, and he had afflicted Moab many days, for Chemosh was angry [fem.] with his land. And his son succeded him, and he also said, I will afflict Moab in my days. He said XII NOTES ON THE PLATE& THE BAAIi LEBANON INSCBIPTION AND TURIN PAPYRUS. The translation of the former is given in the text: the following translation of the latter by Lenonnant is offered in Canon Taylor's Alphabet;— Dens, Domine mi, ex conculcatione servum tuum Pakhim e[npe] Vita unica et verax dominus meus Jehovah .... THE SILOAM INSCRIPTION. The lines in modern square Hebrew run as follows;— Tiya .napan , -dt . .th . nti . napan (p) p . »« . ^p . * . , n^ . JTOK . tr!?» . ni;?ai . iyi . bt^ . trK . )mn oV^i . iru . hy , iT-u . m . mpV . tr n . nasnn . lan . napi . . . Di ,nD« . r\hH) , D'n«Da . na-on .h» .nnon ,p .o^on asnn .^y .isn .naa . rvn .hdn .n THE CARPENTRAS STELE. The following are the transliteration and translation given in Canon Driver's Text of the Books of Samuel, p. XVIIL Kn^K ^TDi« n KHicn ^ann ma Man nana non niDK m^ vh 'snai may kV ty^wa Dynic -np i>D now Dnp p -in nana noiK mp 'Ton i^ai 'nyoj nn^e 'in NOTES ON THE PLATES. XIII Blessed be Taba, the daughter of Tahapi, devoted worshipper DIP, KJ»^a ^3i?npT lani? »nvl» The pointing kindly supplied by Dr. Chamizer should be compared with the specimen given in Baer's Job; and also with that of Merx' Chrestomathia Targumica. THE RABBINIC BIBLE. This page is from the Warsaw edition of 1862. It shows, in the first place, a poetical passage of the text arranged like NOTES ON THE PLATES. XV the bricks in a wall. The column on the left is the Targom -tJt?^::TtSnisf^r^SL;^ Se Urguin, the massorah magna. These are surrounded by S ee^;:m'entaries: to the top and "«f •j/^yj, ^,^^ ^ B*bbi Solomon ben Isaac; to the top and Wt, "'«'^'; "J ^^S,;,"' Eabbi David Kimchi; and along the bottom that of lUlbag rrRabbi Levi ben Ger.on. At the foot of the page are two late hagadio commentaries. ADDENDA ET CORRIGENDA p. 34, 1. 12, Blauin 'Gedenkbiich . . . David Kaufmanii.'Brcs- lau, MKK), shows that the old script continued into the third century a.d. p. 06, 1. 5, Foi- ' Nun ' read 'Vav ' ; so p. viii. 1. lit. p. CO, 1. 22, It has been suggested that the 3 following D^'^t^'J' in 1 S.14, 14 inay-20: similarly in Ps. ilO, 12 P —70. p. 84, 1. 26, Exactly as in Jer. 18, 23 : Ps. 139, 20. p. 85, 1. 8, Add Ps. 95, 7, ' flock ' and ■ people.' p. 89, 1. II, See Blau in J.Q.iJ., viii. 471. p. 99, 1. 1 1, The reference is Baba Bathra 14 b.butthe distinction of former andlatter prophets i8notTalmudic(Blnu). p. 119, 1. 8, Similarly D'/ltC^B with a prefix receives the article. p. 119,1. 15, Other examples will be found Gn. 6, 3: 16, II (regularly) : Ps. 62, 4 : Ph. 68, 3. p.119,1.18, The original orthography is miDP or JT)IDP(Blau). p. 124,1.11, The Qri sometimes is euphemistic as in the case of the words byV and wh^y> (Blau). p. 125, 1. 14, The insertion of the 5m is due to Baer (Blau). p. 139, 141, Add the reference to 1 Chr. 19, 13 [2 R. 10, 12] : .ir,- Zunz, ' Geschichte und Litteratur,' 207, and 'Gesani- melte gchriften,' iii. 77 (Blau). CHAPTER I. EAKLIEST FORM OF WHITING IN ISRAEL. 1. Invention of Alphabetic Writinff. At what period of their liistory the Israelites became acquainted with the art of writing is uncertain. In their traditional history as given in the Old Testament, the art is not referred to before the time of Moses. In the whole of the book of Genesis there is no mention of writing and the verb meaning to write does not once occur. In the account of the acquisition by Abraham of the cave of Machpelah given in the twenty-third chapter of Genesis, nothing is said of a written document or bill of purchase, such as we read of in the similar transaction recorded in the thirty-second chapter of Jeremiah. Mention is made, indeed, m the thirty-eighth chapter of Genesis, of a signet-ring, but this does not necess- arily imply an engraved inscription. As to the period at which alphabetic writing began to be used, the commonly accepted view is that about the year 1500 b. 0. it was pretty generally practised -"-%:u a CHAPTER I. among the Phoenicians. It is not, however, likely, in the nature of tilings, that the Israelites were in their nomadic state acquainted with alphabetic writing. More probably they acquired the art at the time of their settlement on the East and West of the Jordan. The form of writing in use in Palestine about the year 1400 b.c., at least for purposes of international correspondence, was the syllabic Babylonian cuneiform. The Hebrews, however, do not appear ever to have adopted this : at any rate, they are not known ever to have employed a script other than alphabetic. Both the Greek and the Hebrew alphabets go back to the same original. This original script was purely alphabetic and it had a Semitic origin, that is to say, its inventors spoke a Semitic language whether they were themselves Semites or not. The Classical authors are unanimous in their assertion that the Greeks re- ceived the alphabet from the Phoenicians (Herod, v, 58); but as to the original inventors of the alphabet, they variously assign that honour to the Phoenicians (Lucan, Pharsalia iii, 220), Syrians, Assyrians or Egyptians (Ta- citus, Annals xi, 14: Pliny, Nat. Hist. ed. Sillig, vii, 192). The opinion now generally held is that the Phoenicians found alphabetic signs in use in Egypt and adopted these to the exclusion of all others somewhere about the year 1900 b.c. Such a great simplification in the EARLIEST FORM OF WRITING IK ISRAEL. process of writing would naturally appeal to a com- mercial people such as they were. That the alphabet is the invention of a Semitic people is proved by the fact of guttural letters which are peculiar to the Semitic languages being represented in it, as well as by the absence of letters to indicate vowel sounds. At the same time, the possession of an alphabet does not ex- clude the simultaneous employment of a less developed form of writing. 2. Before the Settlement in Canaan, Of the liter- ature and script which existed in Canaan immediately before the immigration of the Israelites some remains have come down to us in the Tell el Amama tablets. These number about three himdred, and were discovered in 1887 by a peasant woman at Tell el Amama in Upper Egypt, the site of the ancient Arsinoe on the east bank of the Nile. They consist for the most part of letters sent by the vassal kings of the Amorites, Philistines and Phoenicians, to Egypt to Amenophis IV, one of the kings of the XVIHth dynasty, whose capital Arsinoe was. They are written in the Aramaic language and in the cuneiform, that is, a non-alphabetic script, and belong to the fourteenth or fifteenth century b. c. On the 14th May 1892 there was discovered at Tell el Hesy, the site of the Lachish of the Old Testament, a precisely similar tablet. This forms the only pre- 4 CHAPTER I. Israelitish inscription as yet found in Palestine. It was discoTered in the Amorite stratum of the mound, and mentions Zimiidi, who was king of Lachish about the year 1400 b. o. and who is also mentioned on the tablets found in Egypt. English versions of this interesting and solitary relic will be found in Lieut.-Colonel. Condor's book on the Tell el Amarna Tablets, and in the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund for Jan. 1893 by Professor Sayce. The trans- lations, however, do not agree. If the Israelites ever acquired and employed this script, which they found in use in the country of their adoption, no remains of it have come down to our time from them. 3. Rrferences to Writing in the Old Testament The earliest reference to writing to be found in the Old Testament is Ex. 17, i4, where Moses is conmianded to write in a book an account of the victory just gained over Amalek in Rephidim, and this may have been the first entry in the Book of the Wars of Jehovah mentioned in Num. 21, u. In £x. 24, 7 Moses reads the Book of the Covenant, that is. Exodus 20 — 23 in- clusive, in the audience of the people and thereafter goes up into the Mountain to receive the two tables of the Law. From this point onwards, the references to [To fko* p. 4] .. Hi J. EARLIEST FORM OF WRITING IN ISRAEL. ■writing occur with increasing frequency, but it is to be noted that it is always as a means of storing up ' and preserving what is written, not of circulating it. The art of writing is a possession of the few and the diffusion or publication of literature takes place orally. But when we come down to the times of the Judges, •the fact that a chance prisoner was able to write down the princes of Succoth for Gideon (Jud. 8, H), seems to point to the knowledge of reading and writing being general. In view, however, of the late date now assigned to most of the earlier books of the Old Testament, it is maintained that statements such as these are valid only for the period in wliich the author wrote, not for that of which he treated. Yet the word which came later to signify 'scribe' ia found in the Song of Deborah (Jud. 6, 14, a. v.) : Out of Machir came down governors, And out of Zebulon they that handle the pen of the writer, and this poem is generally admitted to be the com- position of a poet who was contemporary with the events which he describes. The word translated pen, however, properly means staff and that for scribe may in this passage mean no more than chief, the poet wishing to give variety to his vocabulary. By the beginning of tlie monarchy, in any case, it 6 CHAPTEB I. is evident that the higher ofSciala at court must have possessed a knowledge of writing as well as the king (2 Sam. 11, 14) and the nohles (8,17); and yet reading remained so long an accomplishment of the few, that even as late as the reigns of Ahah and Joash, we find that Elijah and Elisha do not as a rule think it worth while to put their discourses in writing. Samuel, in- deed, reduced to writing the constitution of the new Israelitish monarchy (1 Sam. 10, 25), and written laws existed before the time of the earliest writing prophets (Hos. 8, 12); but of written literature in the strict sense there appears at this period to have been none. Only laws were written and annals: the rest was diffused and handed down orally. Yet so great a change had come over the people within the next hundred years, that not only do Amos and Hosea write their dis- courses, but it is by many supposed that the old sacred legends of the Patriarchs, of the Judges and of David, which had until now been passed on from one generation to another by word of mouth, were now for the first time made permanent in writing. Similarly the poetry of the Arabs of the Time of Ignor- ance, and even that composed after the coming of Muhammed, were not written down until the close of the first century a. h. Even Jeremiah, like many a famous Arabian poet or like the 'illiterate Prophet' [Tq face p. 7] loa^^va^ ]n^ m nnt i^a nm nay nunn mp i^d THE BAAIi LEBANON INSCEIPTION. »^ 'SITJ^ ^»'> -Styx/) ^Yft 1«1 ♦ . , » D^nD pay ntynnriD ■'«io ^« THE TUBIN PAPYKUS (Egyptian Aramaic, p. 16). EARLIEST FORM OF WRITING IN ISRAEL. 7 himself, does not seem to have written anything, whether he couUl have done so or not. In order to determine in what script the earlier prophets, Amos, Hosea, Micah and Isaiah and their contemporaries wrote, it is necessary to tuni to the inscriptions which have survived and have been dis- covered up to the present time. 4. Inscriptions dated after the Settlement in Canaan. The script which prevailed during this period, not only in Palestine itself but also in the countries bordering upon it, was the Phcenician. The following are the principal inscriptions: — 1. The most ancient specimen of the Phoenician script extant is the inscription of Baal Lebanon. It is made up of eight fragments of bronze and was found near the summit of a mountain in Cyprus some twenty miles from LimasoL Six of these form consecutive portions of the rim of a bowl about one foot in diameter and the inscription on them runs: "This vessel of bronze was offered by a citizen of Carthage, servant of Hiram, king of the Sidonians, to Baal Lebanon Ids Lord." The two remaining portions are detached. The bowl is supposed to have formed part of the plunder of a temple on the Lebanon which had been carried to Cyprus. The forms of the letters are the most ancient known and are assigned to the 8 CHAPTEB I. beginning of the ninth century. The Carthage mentioned is not the African city: the name means New Town and might well be common. 2. By far the longest and most important Phoenician inscription of this period yet discovered is the well- known Moabite Stone, which was fomid at Dhiban, the ancient Dibon, in 1868 and which is now in the Louvre. This stele measured forty-one inches by twenty-one and the inscription ran to thirty-four lines. The author of the inscription is Mesha, the king of Moab who is referred to in 2 Kings 1, i and chap. 3. In it he relates how he tlirew off the yoke of the king of Israel, re- covered and rebuilt his towns — most of which are mentioned in Is. 16 and 16 and Jer. 48 — constructed a road across the Amon and subequently undertook an expedition against the Edomites. The date of the in- scription is about the year 896 in the ordinary chrono- logy. The letters present the appearance of having been drawn by a scribe and cut by an illiterate mason. The genuineness of the stone has not been ua- questioned. 3. The fifteen lion-weights — ^weights in the form of a lion — discovered at Nineveh, for the most part bear legends in both cuneiform and Phoenician characters. ' j They belong to the latter part of the eighth and j the beginning of the seventh century. Other small i [To fM* p. •] si SISI EARLIEST FORM OF WHITING IN ISRAEL. 9 t remains in tlie same character have been found else- where. 4. But not only was the Phoenician alphabet known and in general use in the countries bordering upon Palestine: it was the form of vrriting employed by tlie Israelites themselves during the period under review. This fact, which had been long recognised on other grounds, has been put beyond question by the dis- covei-y in the year 1880 of tlie Siloam Inscription. An account of tliis 'find' may be read in the Quarterly Statements of the Palestine Exploration Fund for the year 1881. This inscription is engraved on a recessed tablet in the wall of the tunnel connecting the l)ool of Siloam with St. Mary's well. The letters are over half-an-inch in lieight, deeply incised. The language is pure Hebrew and the script similar to that of the Moabite Stone, but exhibiting a later phase. It is not earlier than the eighth nor later tlian the sixth century. Most likely it belongs to the reign of Hezekiah, the tunnel being the conduit referred to as being the work of Hezekiah in 2 K. 20, 20: 2 Chr. 32, 30: Ecclus. 48, 17. Or, the tunnel may be the work of an earlier time, in which case 'the waters of Shiloah that go softly*, spoken of by Isaiah (8, 6), would mean the waters flowing through the Siloam tunnel. The Siloam Inscription shows the alphabet in use 10 CHAPTER I. in ancient Israel to be a form of PhoBnician not materi- ally different from the other early examples extant. Some of the letters betray a slight movement towards a more advanced type: others, such as the n with three bars and the triangular Jf, show a more archaic form. The long tails are due solely to the taste and fancy of the artist 6. Orthography of {he Period. 1. Word-separation: Both on the Moabite Stone and on the Siloam In- scription the words are separated by a point, as in the oldest Greek inscriptions. 2. Vowel-letters: The scriptio plena is rare. The Moabite Stone regularly omits the ^ of the plural and , dual. In the Silpam Inscription W, h\p, DOSin, ]n3\ ni», niD« and VH are all written defectively, but «31D, Tlj; and »KT in fulL Por the last the Moabite Stone has tsn and it even omits to indicate final vowels as in 11K=>OJM. The suffixal ^ and the verbal affix T are, however, fully written. The suffix of the 3rd pers. sing. masc. is indicated by the letter n in the Moabite Stone but by 1 in the Siloam Inscription, which even writes lyT where the Old Testament Text would have 1ny^. 3. Except the word-divider there are no vowel or other points. THE TWO HEBREW SCRIPTS. 11 4. There are no special forms of letters when final as ri 1 1. 5. There is no hesitation about dividing words at the ends of hues, even in the middle of a syllable. 6. The writing is from right to left 7. The letter B does not occur. CHAPTER II. THE TWO HEBREW SCRIPTS. 1. The Old Hebrew Alphabet. The old Hebrew alphabet, like the Phoenician, consisted of twenty-two letters, all consonants. The OBDEB in which the letters followed one an- other is known first of all from the order of the letters of the Greek alphabet taken according to their nu- merical values. This is confirmed, though not perhaps till the time of the Exile, by the alphabetic Psalms and by the figure called athbash, tS^SMM. Examples of the latter are found in the Bible in Jer. 26, 26 and 61, 1 and 4i. In this cipher a word is disguised by substituting the last letter of the alphabet for the first, the second last for the second and so on. Hence the name. Thus in the passages cited hM is called yovf and n^T03 becomes 'Dp 3^, which the Authorized Version 12 CHAPTER n. translates: 'In the midst of them that rise up against me'. Later or, it may be, earlier, there are the acrostic Psalms 9 and 10, 26, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119 and 145. The other alphabetic portions of the Old Testament are Lam. 1 — 4: Pr. 31, 10—31 and possibly the begin- ning of Nahum. In all these the order of tlie letters is the same as that to which we are accustomed, with one or two exceptions. Thus there seems to be some doubt as to the place of the letter B. In Lam. 2 — 4 it precedes y. In Ps. 37 the y is obscured. Pss. 25 and 34, apparently both the work of the same author, omit 1 and append a second verse commencing with fi at the conclusion. These and other anomalies, how- ever, may be nothing more than corruptions of the text or they may be due to a preference of the sense to the form on the part of the poet The originality of the present order appears also from this, that the letters standing together bear similar names, as ■> and 3 (hand), D (water) and i (fish), p and 1 (head). In the case of the Ethiopic the halves of the alphabet were transposed, whence the conjectural etymology of the word eieOTcnt=LMN-=ABC. The NAMES of the letters are supposed to have been applied to them from a fancied resemblance of the Egyptian signs to certain objects. In this case ire must assume that these had ceased to bear any THE TWO HEBBEW 8CEIPT8. 13 very striking resemblance to their original, so that, what had once been the picture of a foot the Phoe- nicians took for a house, and in what had once been a reed they recognised an ox. In any case the names of the letters are extremely ancient, being the same in Hebrew, Greek and, with exceptions, Ethiopic; and the fact that the Hebrew names are not Hebrew vocables makes it the more probable that they are original. The names are given on the acrophonic prin- ciple, each beginning with the letter of which it is the name. Thus in Ethiopic the word for Hand does not begin with y, and so the letter ' is called yaman, right hand. Similarly, the word nun, 'fish', being obsolete, the letter i is called nahash serpent. In Arabic the names are cut down to monosyllables. The Hebrew names are given for the first time in tlie LXX version of Lam. 1 — 4. The Greek names Alpha, Beta and so on are either feminine or emphatic masculine forms of the Hebrew. In Gamma-=galma=gamla or in Sigma== simka there is also a transposition of letters. In passing over from the Phoenicians to the Greeks the alphabet necessarily underwent various modifications. The letters representing the four guttural sounds wliich are peculiar to the Semitic languages lost their con- sonantal value altogether and became vowels, that is ■^5\ttO became AEHO, the letters being inverted with i. 14 CHAPTER n. the change in the direction of the writing. The pe- culiar Semitic guttural qoph was rejected in Greek as a letter, but retained as a numerical sign for 90 under its old name. It has survived as a letter in the Latin Q. Vav is only a numeral in Greek, with its Hebrew value of 6, but is the Latin F. SatneWi gave its place, form and numerical value of 60 to the Greek "S, but its name to the Greek 2 which has the place and form of sin. Tsadhe is dropped as a letter, but ap- pears as the numeral «ampi*=900, the present value of the modem final y. But whilst the Greek alphabet retained the forms and even the names of the old Hebrew or Phoenician letters almost without alteration, the Eastern scripts diverged more and more from them. The destruction of Phoenician trade hj the later Assyrian kings, and especially the conquest of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar about the year 672, led to the decay and almost com- plete disappearance of the Phoenician script from south- western Asia, and to the substitution in its place, for purposes of commerce and international intercourse, of the Aramean.1 2. Aramean Scripts. The oldest specimens of the i Charts ahowing how one language supplanted another in western Asia will be found in Hommel's Die Semiten und ihre Bedeutung fur die Kulturgeschichte. To fM* p. u] g O THE TWO HEBEEW SCRIPTS. 15 Aramean alphabet wliich have survived are a few characters inscribed on the cuneiform clay tablets of Nineveh, as the Phoenician letters were upon the lion- weights. They belong to the seventh century. Later this script is found on tlie coins of the numerous Per- sian Satraps down to the time of Alexander the Great, 333 B. c. There is very little noticeable in tlie way of divergence from the Plioenician during this period beyond the opening of the loops of certain letters sucli as B and D ; A and ^ become J and f. ' 2. Meantime an Aramean script is found in Egypt The oldest instance of its occurrence is the stele of Saqqarah near Cairo found in 1877. It belongs to the year 482 b. c, but the letters are indistinct ; and tho cardinal example of the Egyptian Aramaic is the memorial tablet called, after the French town where it now lies, the Carpentras Inscription, belonging to the latter part of the fourth centuiy. There are also a number of papyri which bring the history of this script down to the first centmy b. c, several being com- positions of a religious nature apparently by Jews.* 3. A third stage in the development of the Aramean alphabet is found in the series of inscriptions belonging > Oriental Series of Palseographical Soc. plates 25, 26 and 63. 16 CHAPTER II. to the first three Christian centuries and known as the Palmyrene. One of these and prohably tlie oldest is dated the year 9 b. c. Several have been found in Algeria and one as far north as South Shields; but by far the greater number have been found at Palmyra and belong to the time of Odenathus and Zenobia, 266 — 273 A. D. Hence the name. There are two varie- ties of this script, a highly ornate uncial and a cursive. The language in which the inscriptions are written is a dialect of Aramaic resembling the Biblical. 3. Orthography of the Rriod. 1. Word-separation: The words are no longer divided by a point as in the Moabite Stone and Siloam Inscription but (except in the Palmyrene) by a space. 2. Vowel letters are used as freely as in the present text of the Old Testament. 3, There is still no trace of vowel or other points. 4 The use of ligatures in the Egyptian Aramaic and in the Palmyrene involved a distinction of initial and final forms of letters so connected. In some of the Egyptian papyri the letters kaph, lamed and nun have each two forms. 5. The most important point to note at present is that the Aramean scripts diverge from the Phoenician in the direction of the Hebrew square character, until in the Palmyrene they become almost identical with THE TWO HEBREW SCRIPTS. 17 it. This is seen most distinctly (a) in the opening of the loops of the letters heth, daleth, feth, qoph and resh: A4[0]p/1 become JJiyW^H: (b) in the omission of the bars characteristic of the letters he, vav, zayin, heth and tau; and (c) in the tails of the kaph, lamed, mem, pe and tsadhe, which are vertical in the old Aramaic, beginning in the Egyptian Aramaic to curve towards the left 4. 27ie New Hebretv Character. After the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon the Phoenician script had ceased to be the channel of commercial inter- course in the countries bordering upon Palestine. It had passed on to the West ^nd its place had been taken by the more cursive Aramaic in Mesopotamia, Cilicia and Syria, and in Egypt wliere it was the script employed by the Jews in th'e second century before Christ, if not earlier still. At the same time the Aramaic Language became the lingua franca of the Seleucid Empire displacing Assyrian, Babylonian, Hebrew and Phoenician. In Syria the Aramean script divided into two branches : a northern which grew into Syriac, and a southern or Jewish from wliich the Hebrew square character was produced, some time before the commencement of the Christian era. 5. Inscriptions in New Hebrew Character. The oldest example of the Hebrew square character is 18 CHAPTER 11. thought to be an inscription found in a cave at Araq al Ameer near Heshbon which was used as a place of retreat in the year 176 b. c. > The inscription, which may date much later tlian that, consists of five letters, which are variously read iTa"iy, Arabhyah, and rraiB, Tobiah, according to the initial letter which is doubtful. In either case two of the letters belong to the old script: on the latter reading the scriptio plena is to be observed. A number of other short inscriptions, all probably to be assigned to the century before the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70 a.d., have been found. Two identical inscriptions ^ were found near the supposed site of ancient Gezer bearing the words "Mi Dnn, that is, Limit of Gezer. But the longest inscription of this period is that over the entrance of the so-called Tomb of St. James, really the tomb of the Bene Hezir mentioned in 1 Chr. 24, is, Neh. 10,21. The letters are in the square character but very rudely formed. The final nun is distinguishable from the medial, but not so pe; and vav, zayin and yod are scarcely to be distinguished from one another. Ligatures are used.' i Joaephns Ant. xii, 4, 11 : Chwolson Corp. Inacr. Hebr. DO. I: Driver p. XXII. * Chwolaon noa. II and II a. > Driver p. XXIII. [To fko* p. 18] CO O HH H & 09 (A n I I '*i T Is ? 3 1= k P c I I C C 5> -£• D n n c. D C V. C n £ r. r c x: -c o T c c c c tz. r\ e. n r~ n r\ a> II •3 -2 . CD o u flQ §^ g. a C CT iH en «e t^ .2 -S -^ CQ .2* .1 M M S •a -J ,3! o. « I THE TWO HEDEEW SCRIPTS. 19 The inscriptions of the next two centuries arc found outside Palestine; but in the year 1863 Benan dis- covered among the ruins of one of the synagogues of Kefr Birim near Safed an inscription' which he as- signed to about the year 300 a. d., though it may well be earlier. In it "the transition to the Hebrew square character may be said to be accomplished" 2. Tiie 'scriptio iJlena is regular, and final D, ] and >] are used. ' During the subsequent centuries inscriptions arc found all over the then civilized world in Italy, France, Spain, at Babylon, Tiflis and Derbend. From Aden there are two dated inscriptions, one of the year 916 which is also the date of the oldest dated Hebrew Manuscript 3. The forms of the letters in this latter are the same as those in use at the present day, but without tlie uniform squareness, the great resemblances between different letters, and the useless tags and apices added to the forms by way of ornameni These are due to a later and vicious style. 6. Summary. Thus the Hebrew square character ias seen in the printed texts of the Old Testament is a development of a branch of the Aramean script, which was also the mother of the two other great > Chwokon no. 17. » Driver p. XXV. * The dates of the Crimean tombstoneB and MSS are generally regarded ag forgeries. B2 20 CHAPTEB tr. Semitic literary scripts, Arabic and Syriac. By the third century B. c. the Aramean script was in general use in those countries where Assyrian, Babylonian, Hebrew and Fhcsnician had been employed before. But though general, its use was not universal in south- western Asia. To this day the Samaritan Bible — the fiye Books of Moses — ^is read from a form of the old Hebrew or Phoenician character; and in the time of the Maccabees, and even as late as the war of Bar Gochba 135 A. D., coins were struck in the same char- acter as is found on the Moabite Stone, a thousand years earlier. The question now arises: When, if ever, were the Jewish Scriptures transliterated from the old Hebrew of the Siloam Inscription, in which the more ancient portions were originally written down, into the square character of the present day? But before proceeding to this point it will be convenient here to say some- tlu'ng about the writing materials employed by the Hebrews before and after the Exile. 7. Writing materials.* The stylus DJ? was made of a material suitable to the substance on which it was intended to be used. For engraving on stone or metal an iron style was used, Job 19, 24, sometimes furnished Benzinger, Hebraieche Archeeologie, p. 290. THE TWO HEBSEW SCBIFT8. 21 -' with a diamond point, Jer. 17, i. In one obscure passage. Is. 8, i, the chisel ts'in is mentioned as a writing instrument: it has probably some connection with the name given to the Egyptian sacred scribes DnSBVI in Genesis, Exodus and, after them, in Daniel Otherwise the style was such a reed as was used in Egypt from the earliest times. In Ps. 46, 2 the LXX rightly translate by KoAa/ios. The pen-knife mentioned in Jer. 36, 23 was used to sharpen the calamus. The ink, Jer. 36, is, was carried in the ink-horn, Ezek. 9, 2, as at the present day in the girdle of the professional scribe. The oldest material used for writing upon was in Syria as in Babylon clay, as is proved by the Tell el Amama tablets. Documents which it was desired to preserve were engraved on stone or metal. Probably \fhi Is. 8, 1 means not a roll, as the Authorized Version has it, but such a metal tablet. The plural is trans- lated 'glasses' at ch. 3, 23, that is, metal mirrors. Lead tablets were in use among the Greeks and Romans, but in Job 19, u the meaning seems to be tracing out the letters themselves in molten lead upon the rock. 2 Esdras 14, 24 mentions boxwood as one material used, c£ Luke 1, 63. Such materials however were soon discarded for 22 CHAPTEB IL ordinary use, and by the times of the kings we already read of 'books' being used, if not earlier, Ex. 24, 7 : Is. 30, 8 and often. The papyrus plant. Is. 18, 2, extinct in Lower Egypt, still grows abundantly in Palestine in the Huleh, the plain of Gennesaret and elsewhere, and may have furnished the material of wliich books were made. Yet the Old Testament nowhere mentions paper as being used for that purpose: the word occurs 2 John 12, 2 Esdras 16, 2, Tobit 7, i4. Neither is there any evidence in the Old Testament for the use of skins; though the JaTCIC have the words x^/^Tibv and x^F^P ii Jer. 36 (in the Greek 43). The only scriptural passage where parchment is mentioned is 2 Tim. 4, 13, and Jo- sephus speaks of a magnificent roll of the Law written on parchment as having been sent to Egypt in the year 286 b. c. The books were in the form of rolls, Ezek. 2, 9, each end of which was wound round a staff. The writing was in columns, Jer. 36, 23, beginning from the right hand staff. Sometimes the roll was written on both sides. i- THE CHASOE OF 8CBIPT. 23 CHAPTER HL THE CHAKQE OF 8CBIPT. 1. Varioiis Theories. As to the question of tlie change of script from the old Hebrew of the Siloam Inscription to the modem square character, the fact of any change at all having taken place lias been denied. This was the opinion ofEleazar of Modin, ■{• 1 35a. d., wliich he founded on a Rabbinic deduction from the mention of the hooks of the pillars in Ex. 27, lo, as well as on tlie mention of the Jewish script and language in Esther 8, 9: he said that the language had not changed and so the script had remained unchanged also. Another opinion was that, though the script had changed, yet the square character was the original. The Patriarch Rabbi Jehuda the Holy, the collector of the Mishnah, b. 136, d. c. 210, wlio generally goes by the name of Rabbi without any further qualification, said: The Law was given to Israel in the square character: when they sinned the script was changed to YV^'t aud when they repented in Ezra's time the old character was restored. He founds this opinion on Zech 9, 12: 'Turn again to the stronghold ye pri- soners of hope: even to-day do I declare that I will render double unto thee.' He says the stronghold is 24 CHAPTEB m. Jerusalem and to render double, TMVC, means to restore the law to its old garb, yv^ is supposed to be a mis- take for YV"] and to be the deession of Epiphanius, the form of script used on monuments, that is, the PhoBnician. Neither of these opinions, however, is to be accepted ; because they are not ba«ed on any tradition, but solely on ezegetical and theological or hagadic grounds — on a conTiction of the sanctity and immutability of even the form of the letter of Scripture. The same view, however, as to the existence and use of the present Hebrew character by the Israelites be- fore the Exile has been put forward within recent years, on another ground, — that the conservative mind of the post-exilic Jews makes any change of script after that event impossible*. But this assumption seems to be disposed of by the fact of the striking of coins in the old character so late as the second Christian century and at a moment of intense religious and national ex- citement By others* the injunction given to Isaiah (8, i) to 'write with the pen of a man' is interpreted as meaning to write in a certain character, and it is always pos- sible that one form of script may have been employed > Stntck. 1 Hoffmann. THE CHANGE OF SCRIPT. 25 for writiiig on stone and another for metal tablets and parchment or papyrus, as in Egypt there were, accord- ing to Clemens Alexandrinus and Porpliyry, three scripts in use at one and the same time, the Hieroglyphic, Hieratic and Demotic, thougli Herodotus mentions only two (ii, 36) a profane and a sacred. It is true, also, that the upper classes in Isaiah's time spoke both Hebrew and Aramaic, 2 K. 18, 26=l8. 36, ii, and could read the latter, 2 K. B, 7, but it does not follow that tlicy were in the habit of writing their own language witli Aramaic letters, and the passage Is. 8, i probably only means to write distinctly in large letters, and not in the ordinary cursive hand. And there is no reason to doubt that the characters found on the Siloam In- scription are the characters in which Isaiah virrote the autographs of his prophecies, and in which all the pre-exilic literature of the Hebrews was written down. In dealing with the question as to when the change of script took place, it is convenient to make a dis- tinction between the Law and the rest of the books. In the case of the latest books no change would be necessaiy, if their authors already wrote in tlio square character. 2. The Change in the Law. The most ancient authority on the change of script of the Hebrew law- books is Eleazar ben Jacob who lived after the middle 26 CHAPTER m. of the first century a.d. He states that a prophet at the time of the return from the Captivity declared that the Torah was to he written in the square character. The next authority is about a century later, when R. Jose states, after Ezra 4, 7, tliat Ezra introduced both a new script and a new language. But the hcus dassietia on this point ia a passage in the Talmud, treatise Sanhedrin 21b, where it is said: 'Originally the Law was given to Israel in the Hebrew character and in the holy tongue: it was given again to them in the days of Ezra in the Assyrian character and in the Aramaic tongue. Israel chose for herself the As- syrian character and the holy tongue and left the Hebrew character and the Aramaic tongue to the ni&VTn'. In this passage the old script is called Hebrew, ^"OJf 3fO: the modem square character aro ^tt?H. There are three possible explanations of the term "IWH. The first is that it is equivalent to ICi^KD, i. 6. straight, or as the script came to be named later, square, y310. Then there is the explanation of K. Levi of the third century that 'IWK means Assyrian; and this term again is capable of two interpretations. It may be loosely used for Babylonian as it is in Num. 24, 22. 24 : Herod, i, 106, 178 ; and so the Talmudic 1WHD DiTOy )hvvf, 'which letters came up with them from Babylon;' or again ^^^B'K may be loosely used for THE CraANOE OF 8CBIPT. 27 Syrian, that is, Aramaic. Cf. the LXX rendering of Jer. 35 (42), ii and their appendix to Job. The word nwvin was explained by R. Hasda -{- 309 as meaning the Cutheans, that is Samaritans, 2 K. 17, 24. But this explanation is due to malice, and the word is to be taken in its proper sense as the transliteration of the Greek ISmtm the equivalent of the Hebrew pun oy, the un- instructed laity. The Talmudic tradition from the second century on- wards is unanimous in crediting Ezra with the introduction of the square character, as far as the Law was con- cerned. These statements cannot be accepted on their own merits; for until the second century there is no reference to Ezra, and the tradition of the first century only mentions an unnamed prophet of Ezra's time. Moreover, as has been frequently remarked, the Talmud is very prone to assign to Ezra everything which can by no possibility be referred to Moses. All that can be inferred from such statements is that, as is known already from Matt. B, is, in the first century the square character was employed in the copies of the Law. The foreign origin of this script was ac- knowledged, and regarded as an uncomfortable fact which had to be made the best of. Hence the change of script was either denied altogether, or represented as a reversion to the original usage or, lastly, the 28 CBAPTEB m. responsibility was laid on the shoulders of an acknow- ledged authority such as Ezra and so legalized. But the necessity for such a reference at all seems to point to the fact that the new script was still, in the first century, of disputed authority, although it had then been employed for such a length of time that its origin was lost. A further objection to Ezra as the originator of the new practice is the absence of any mention of such a thing in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, whoever the author of these books may have been. The testimony of Josephus points to an Aramaic script. In Antiquities xii, 2, 4 he makes Demetrius, the librarian of Ptolemy U, Fhiladelphus (284-247) speak of the Law as written in Hebrew characters; but in the first section of the same chapter he speaks of there being many books of laws among the iTews which were worthy of being added to the king's library but which, being written in a language and a character of their ovm, yet very like the Aramaic, would be diffi- cult of translation. The question is still further complicated by the existence among the Samaritans of a character very little removed from the old Hebrew. The Samaritans are a mixed race descended from the northern Israelites who remained in the laud after the deportation of 722, THE CHANGE OF 8CKIPT. 29 and the foreign colonists then introduced, 2 K. 17, 24. On the return of the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity they offered their assistance in rebuilding the walls and temple of Jerusalem. This the Jews, who had been made more exclusive by exile, declined, refusing also to allow the Samaritans to participate iu their worship. On Nehemiah's return to Jenisalem ho found that they had succeeded in establishing themselves there and that the daughter of Sanhallat had been married to the high priest's grandson (13, 28). Ex- pelled by Nehemiah, this person seems to have re- moved with those Jews who refused to be ruled by Kehemiah, to Samaria, establishing there an organized religious community. These events occurred about the year 433, but Josephus thought they happened exactly a century later, at the beginning of Alexander's suprem- acy. Ant. xi, 7, 2. Whichever date be correct, this was most probably the occasion from which the Sa- maritan Pentateuch had its origin. Perhaps the most important divergence which it makes from the Hebrew text — the reading of Gerizim for Ebal in Dt. 27, 4 — was made at the same time. The present value of the Samaritan Pentateuch lies in this, that at whatever time it was obtained from the Jews, that is at the l atest probably about the year 433, these latter still employed the old script. Yet there is nothing historic- 30 CHAPTER m. ally impossible in the old view which looked upon the Samaritan Pentateuch simply as the Law which had existed in both Judah and Israel from much earlier times. In that case it would contribute nothing to the subject of discussion. 3. In the Other Books. However the case may have been with the Law, the other books continued to be written in the old script after Ezra's time. The reference to the jots and tittles of the Law, Matt. 6, is, rather gains point, if we suppose them to have been confined to it. The book of Esther (8, 9) speaks of the Jewish language and writing as peculiar to them. The Jewish language can only mean the language of the book of Esther — Hebrew, and the Jewish writing, as distinguished ft-om the Aramaic at the time in use throughout the Persian Empire alongside of the cunei- form, can only be the old Hebrew character. In the book of Daniel, which is generally now dated 165 b. c, there is the writing on the wall which could not be read except by a Jew. The Chaldeans used Aramaic: the other writing must be intended to be old Hebrew.* 4. Evidence ofLXX. The LXX translation is hardly evidence for the script of Palestine seeing that it was made in Alexandria. The Law was probably translated as the tradition states in the reign of Ptolemy II, and by the middle of the second century b. c. the complete THE CHANGE OF SCRIPT. 31 1 translation of the Old Testament into Greek had been accomplished, at least so far as it existed and was known to Ben Sira '. Variations of the LXX from the Hebrew, due to mistaking one letter for another, point to an early form of the square character as that in which the copies used by the LXX were written. But, as has been said, the Jews of Egypt employed the Aramaic script in tlie second century b. c. if not before, and this does not prove that the same script was in use in Palestine equally early. 5. Evidence of Text Itself. A better source of evidence is found in the variations between parallel passages in the Hebrew text itself. The best examples of these for the present pui-pose are found in the lists of proper names, as for instance of the cities of the Levites in Josh. 21 and 1 Chr. 6, or of David's heroes in 2 S. 23 and 1 Chr. 11, or in the genealogical trees in the books of Chronicles and those in the other books. Gesenius in his 'Geschichte der hebriiischen Sprache und Schrift' § 43 gives the following amongst others: 1. Confusion of 3 and 3, Neh. 12, 3 and 14, She- chaniah and Shebhaniah: 11, 17=1 Chr. 9, i5. t and ^ Gen. 36, 27—1 Chr. 1, 42. 3 and D, 1 K. 7, 4i-2 Chr. 4, n, le. 1 Ecclug. prologue. 32 CHAPTEE m. 3 and 1, Ps. 18, 12— 2 S. 22, 12. t and 1, Ps. 31, 3—71, 3. i and 1, Ezra 2, 2=Neh. 7, 7: Nebuchadnezzar and N ebuchadrezzar. 3 and D, 2 S. 23, 35-= 1 Chr. 11, 37. I J and n, Num. 26, 35— 1 Chr. 7, 20: Josh. 21, 82= 1 Chr. 6, 61. 2. 1 and 1, Ps. 18, ii-2 S. 22, 11: Lev. 11, i4=.Dt. 14, 13 and very often. 3. a and 1, 2 S. 23, 29=1 Chr. 11, 30. The consonants most frequently confused in the Hebrew text are t and T which are very much alike both in the old and in the new scripts. 3 and 1 on tlie other hand are more similar in the old, but they also resemble one another in the earlier though not in the later Aramaic. The other examples point to the square character for their origin, and may be taken as proving that, when these errors arose, the hooks were written in that character. But the question is, "When did these errors arise? They arose subsequently to the date of the LXX translation, for they are 'not found in that translation with rare exceptions. Of all the instances which Gesenius cites only one clear case of the Greek reproducing the error of the Hebrew text occurs and that one is from the books of Samuel (II, 22, 11). These books became corrupt at a very ' (Io't*e» f. M] JDWISH AMD OTHDR OOINa SHKKKL OF SIVON HACOABAUS. Silver. HALF-SHKKBL. BiLvn. OOIN OF AUOUSTtrS, «rBn» AT AimoCB, iKO mowH i» thi Niw Tbstamiht as thc AaSABIOW OB Fakthiho, Bbomzi. DBNABIUB OF TIBBBIUS— Th» "Pbckt." Bilvcb SHALL JBWIBB OOIN OF ALBXANDBR JANKAUB, rsoBAiiLT th* "Mm." BBOHn. lOS— TSb.o. THE CHANGE OF 8CBIPT. 33 early date and to a greater extent than any other book in the Old Testament. Hence the divergent readings of parallel passages of the Hebrew text instead of proving tlio square character to have been in early use, show that the books in which these divergences occur were not written in that character until after the completion of the LXX translation, that is until about the middle of the second century b. c. at thc earliest. 6. Conclusion. After the testimony of the Talmud, the main argument for the ascription of the introduction of the square character to Ezra, is the belief that after his time the script was regarded as sacred and could not have been changed. It is very doubtful whether this was the case. The coins of the periods of the Maccabees and of the last Jewish war would certainly have been struck in the sacred script if a sacred script had existed at the time, but their legends are in the Hebrew language and in the old Hebrew script, although those of Herod were stamped in the Greek language and character; so it is not a case merely of the retention of a practice obsolete elsewhere, like the retention by the Arabs of the Gufic character on their coins or in the titles of the Surahs of the Koran long after the present script was in use for other purposes, or like the retention of Latin on some of our coins. It points 34 CHAPTER rV. rather to two scripts having been in use at the time, like the Roman and black-letter types in Germany, or like the Arabic and Roman systems of numerals. The old Hebrew letters seem to have been used for busi- ness purposes long after the square character was used exclusively for sacred piurposes. Moreover, the old script was more legible to western foreigners than the new. And the Talmud permits Jews resident out- side of Palestine to possess copies of the Law in Coptic, Median, Hebrew, Elamitic and Greek. Here 'Hebrew' can only mean the old Hebrew script, not the language, and the other terms must mean scripts also. CHAPTER IV. THE PEE8EBVATI0N OE THE TSXT. 1. Internal Conditions. The Jews were well, indeed, named by the Arabs one of the peoples of the Book. Ever since the discovery of the book of the law in the temple at Jerusalem in the reign of Josiah in the year 625, or it may have been centuries before that date, their religion has been inseparably bound up vrith a book; but from the time of the return from Babylon the religion of Palestine became an attempt to fulfil to the letter the written word. And when the national THE PBE8EBVATI0N OF THE TEXT. 35 centre of that religion was destroyed, tlie whole soul of the nation was thrown into, and for centuries ab- sorbed in, the study of the Book. Hence it comes about that, whereas no manuscript of any part of the Jewish Scriptures older than the tenth century is known to exist in the original language, yet by means of citations from tliem in Jewish works of the second century and earlier, by means of quotations in the New Testament and, still more, from the LXX trans- lation it is possible to sliow that the consonantal text as it existed at the beginning of the Christian era was substantially what it is now. Although the Jews of that and later periods do not seem to have had any scruples about transliterating it into other scripts or even translating it into other languages, such as the Muslims have in the case of the Koran, yet they evinced a regard for the letters of the original text themselves almost amounting to superstition. It seems to have been the transliterated copies of the Jewish Scriptures for use in countries outside Palestine that suggested to Origen the idea of the second column of the Hexapla, which represents the Hebrew text in Greek letters >. Origen lived from 185 to 254 All the most important Greek translations of the Old * Blau, Heilige Schrift p. 81. C» 36 CHAPTEE rV. Testament were made by Jews — the LXX, those of Aquila, Theodotion and Symmachus — and had for their object a nearer approximation in sense to the Hebrew — that of Aquila being so extremely literal that it can hardly be called Greek. For example, in Gen. 1, i he translates l>TNn riK by trw t^i* y^i'. The Syriac (Peshitto) version is also apparently the work of Jewish or of Jewish-Christian hands. 2. External (Hrcumstances. In addition to the great labour expended in the attempt to arrive at the exact sense of Scripture, external circumstances also con- spired to preserve the purity of the text. As persecution pui-ifies the Church, so it at the same time purifies its literature. Even a persecution directed against the books themselves, like that of Antiochus Epiphanes, while reducing the number of copies only increases the care bestowed in emending and protecting those which survive. There are three moments in Jewish history at which the existence of their sacred literature was especially endangered. The first was that which ended in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple under Nebu- chadnezzar in the year 687 b. o. Amongst the plimder oarried away to Babylon, books are not named, but they must surely have formed part of it, for the captives THE PKESEBVATION OF THE TEXT. 37 themselves would cUng to them. We know the names of some books which no longer exist and which may well have perished at this time. Such is the Book of Jashar mentioned Josh. 10, is Hebr. 2 S. 1, 18 and 1 K. 8, 63 LXX. Both this and the Book of the Wars of Jehovah (Num. 21, 14) were probably collections of lyrics, chiefly war-songs, such as the Lament of David over Jonathan, which would naturally, amongst the Jews as amongst other peoples, form tlie beginnings of literature. It is often supposed that it was during the Exile that the early historical materials were worked up into something of their present shape as found in the books from Genesis to Kings, after which the sources of this compilation may have been discarded as separate books. Similarly the Law is supposed to have been re- duced to its present form in the years following the return from the Exile. The second epoch at which the Jewish sacred liter- ature was brought into jeopardy of its existence was that of the persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes. This was the first religious persecution to which the Jews were subjected from without, and the only one for centuries. Antiochus ordered all copies of the Law or even of any of the books to be destroyed ; and any person found in possession of a copy of the former was liable to capital punisliment, 1 Mace. 1, 56. 57, Jos. Ant. 38 CHAPTER IV. xii, 5. The author of Cbroniclea appears to mention a considerable historical and biograpliical literature which has not surrived. For a third time the Jewish Scriptures were seriously imperilled on the occasion of the capture of Jerusalem by Titus and the destruction of the Temple. But by this time the Law at least had long been a definite fixed quantity, which had been minutely studied and commented upon, to such an extent that if every copy had perished it could have been restored from memory. Besides, ever since the exile there had existed a Jewish colony in Babylon, where the scriptures were as eagerly studied as in Palestine, if not more so. According to the Babylonian Tahnud the copies of the Law were destroyed by Titus, but Josephus (Wars vii, 5, 7) states that one copy had a place in the triumph of Vespasian. In this copy, which is the earliest manuscript of the Law known as having existed, there are said to have been thirty-two trivial variations from the received text, some of which are said to have been found also in a manuscript belonging to fi. Meir of the second century. Some idea of the slightness of the variations which attracted notice even at this early period may be ob- tained from the following examples: 6n. 18, 21: for 'its cry' read 'their cry'. 24, 7: for 'my native land' read 'my land'. THE PKESEEVATION OF THE TEXT. 39 48, 7: omit the reference to Bethlehem, Rachel's tomb being in Benjamin. Dt. 29, 22 : omit ' Admah and Zeboim'. Vespasian's manuscript was deposited in tlie royal palace at Rome and subsequently in the year 220 handed over to the synagogue of Asverus, i. e. Severus, most probably the emperor Alexander Sevenis who was a good friend to the Jews. The other scriptures were not considered so sacred as the Law, but they were considered sacred and minutely studied. Jerome mentions a various reading in Is. 21, 11 of Rumah, i. e. Rome, for Dumah: in a manuscript belonging to R. Meir it was also found. It is stated that at one time only three manuscripts of the Law were left and that a text was obtained by the simple method of choosing in every instance of diversity the reading of two against one. Josephus (Life 76) states that he obtained from Titus a gift of the sacred books after the fall of the City. Doubts have been cast upon these statements of Josephus and others, and such early accounts are generally simply discarded. But that such a process of ascertaining and fixing the true text, especially of the Law, was thus early gone through is clear from the result — that there are no various readings in the Hebrew text of~tEeT)ld Testament in the sense in 40 CHAPTBE rV. which we speak of various readings in the New. Attention is drawn to tliis fact in the preface to the Revised English Version. 3. The LXX Version. Tiiere is only one of the ancient Versions which has any claim to come into competition with the Hebrew original as a witness to the text, and that is the LXX. This claim rests upon two grounds. In the first place the Greek manuscripts are centuries older than the Hebrew— the former of the fourth, the latter of the tenth century. Secondly, the LXX was made long before a uniform Hebrew text such as we now have existed — from the middle of the third to the middle of the second century b. c, whereas there is no evidence for the existence of a uniform Hebrew text before the first century of our era. At that time the Hebrew and Greek Bibles lived together in Palestine, and the Apostles quoted either indiffer- ently, so little did their divergences affect the sense. Apart from the Apocrypha it is only in the Book of Jeremiah and in the later chapters of Sxodus that the Greek differs very widely from tlie Hebrew. In the former the Greek is the shorter by one eighth of the whole, but tliis is mostly effected by dropping certain constantly recurring formulae ; though the order of the chapters is also completely changed, and it is a question whether tho Greek is a condensation of the Hebrew, .i' DESCRIPTION OF TEXT OF FIEST CENTUBT. 41 or the Hebrew an expansion in Rabbinic style of the original text. In the case of the other books the LXX forms an invaluable aid towards the restoration of the text in those places wliere it has become corrupt, especially in those books where the translator does not seem to have been able to make any intelligible sense of the original. CHAPTER V. DESCBIPTION OF TEXT OF FIEST CENTUBT. 1. Purdy Consonantal. In order to obtain some idea of the appearance which the Hebrew text presented at the period of its first reduction to uniformity about the beginning of the Christian era, it is necessary to remember that the script at this time consisted solely of consonants, in an early form of the square character, resembling tliat of tlie earliest inscriptions in that character. The letters may have been much smaller than we are used to, for Jerome complains of their being trying to the eyes. The different books were written on separate rolls. By 'books' in the Old Testa- ment we must understand rolls or volumes, as in Is. 34, 4 'the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll', "IBD. The word nVjD is not used before the time of 42 CHAPTER V. Jeremiah and then only in a few passages. Jesus was handed the roll of the prophecies of Isaiah, Luke 4, 17. Most of these volumes were the property of the synagogues^ private persons rarely possessed one, hut acquired their knowledge of their contents in the schools and from hearing them read in the synagogues, where the Law was read through regularly once in three years and accompanied hy extracts from the prophets. The text ran on continuously without division into chapters or, probahly, verses ; but the words were separated hy an interstice as well as indicated by the use of final letters. The four vowel letters were used more spar- ingly in the earlier, regularly in the later books, but there were no other vowel-signs. The text consisted wholly of the twenty-two consonants, except that a few words were marked by the scribes with one or more dots placed over them. 2. Word-Separation. On the Moabite Stone and Siloam Inscription the words are divided by means of a point This point is found also in the Samaritan Pentateuch ; so that it was still employed by the Jews in the year 433 or possibly later, that is, at whatever date the Samaritan Pentateuch was obtained from them. On coins both Samaritan and Jewish, on gems and Phoenician inscriptions generally, it is not found, nor DEBCEIPTION OF TEXT OF FIBST CENTOBT. 43 on Aramean Inscriptions. In these last, with the ex- ception of the Palmyrene, the words are divided by a space. It is natural to suppose that when the Old Testament autographs were written in the old Hebrew character they had this point, but that when they began to be written in the square character the use of the point was dropped. Hence it frequently happens that letters are combined to form one word instead of two, and the converse. There are fifteen places mentioned by tradition, where two words are written as one. They are Gen. 30, n 133 for M MS: Ex. 4, 2: Dt. 33, 2 (text corrupt): Is. 3, 15 D3^B for D3^ no: Jer. 6, 29 should read DD B^MD 'is consumed of fire': 18, s: Ezek. 8, 6: Ps. 10, 10 D"'K3/n 'weak persons,' for n"'lO ^n, 'a host of af- flicted': Ps. 55, 16 (15) the text means 'let desolations be upon them': 123, 4: Neh. 2, is: 1 Chr. 9, 4: 27, 12: Job 38, 1 and 40, e, where |D is written in full, as would always be done at first Uke the Arabic article, even although the \ is assimilated to the following consonant, cf. the Latin inL^^ill. Other examples are Jer. 44, is tK )D: Joel 1, 12: 1 Chr. 5, is ^33 p and frequently. One word is written as two in Jud. 16, 25: 1 S. 9, i: 24, 9: Is. 9, 6: 44, 24: 2 Chr. 34, 6: Lam. 1, e: 4, 3. Other passages in which tradition and the text difi'er, are 2 S. 5, 2 «^1D nn^n for M-'Sien n^\n: Ezek. 42, 9: Job 38, 12: Ezra 4, 12. 44 CHAPTEB V. / The LXX, based as it was on an Aramean text in / wliich the dividing point was not used, frequently groups the letters diflferently from the Hebrew. Examples are: Hos. 11, 2 Hebrew Dn^3BD From before them. Greek nn '3BD From before me. They... 1 Ohr. 17, 10 Hebrew "ff IM) And I told thee, Greek 1^1J«1 And I shall make thee great. Ps. 106, 7 Hebrew tr by By the sea, Greek why Going up. Ps. 73, 4 Hebrew OniD^ At their death, Conjecture DH ^n'> To them. Perfect »... 3. Other Breaks in the Text. Neither was there any indication to mark the end of a verse, other than the same space which was used for the end of a word. For frequently the verse division is wrong or the TiXX divides differently from the Hebrew, just as in the case of words. Thus in Gn. 49, 19, 20, instead of, 'overcome at the last. Out of Asher . . . .' we must read, 'press upon their heel As for Asher . . .,' making the first letter of v. 20 the last of v. 19, Ps. 42, 6, 7 : 'His countenance. O my God,' should be, 'my countenance and my God,' as in v. 12 and 43, 5. And so some texts read. < For other examples cf. Driver p. XXXI. DESCBIPTION OF TEXT OP FIRST CENTUBY. 45 Jer. 9, B, 6; instead of, 'Thine habitation is in the midst of deceit', HDID lina ^n3ty, The LXX join the first two letters to the previous verse, '(weaiy them- selves) to repent. Oppression upon oppression, deceit (upon deceit),' nonoa noio iiro ir\ jat? wVi. Ps. 90, 2, 8: 'Thou art God. Thou turnest (man to destruction).' The LXX read 'Thou art. Turn not...' which accounts for the jussive atSTl and so, too, in verses 11, 12. If the word or verses had been divided by a point the variations with the LXX and the evident wrong divisions should have been fewer: if there had been no indication at all, they should have been more fre- quent. The conclusion is that words and verses were divided simply by a space. Moreover, there was in the text of the first century no division into chapters or even books. The Psalms themselves were not separated at first, so that their number is now doubtful. The Authorized English Version follows the Hebrew. But the Greek makes one Psahn of 9 and 10 and of 114 and 115, at the same time splitting 116 and 147 each into two. The Syriac follows the LXX with regard to 114 and 147, thus still preserving the total of 150. Some manu- scripts join together Psalms 42 and 43. Ps. 1 does 46 CHAPTEB V. not seem to have been counted, for in Acts 13, ss the Codex Bezae calls the second Psalm the first. 4. The Final Forms of Letters. Connected with the indication of the division of words is the use of special final forms of letters. In the old Hebrew of the Siloam Inscription there are no special final forms. These are a necessary result arising from the employment of ligatures between the letters which modify the forms of the letters which they unite. Ligatures begin to make their appearance in the Egyptian Aramaic and the Palmyrena Hence in some of the Egyptian Papyri of the second century b. o. tliere is found a distinction between the initial and medial and final forms of Icaph, lamed and nun. Final nun is also found in the earliest square Hebrew inscriptions, that is, in the first century. Final mem and pe are not found in any inscription until the end of the third century. But it is known from other sources that by the first centuiy five special final forms had been accepted and the rest rejected. These were, in alphabetical order, T D | *) y. In all except D the final form is obtained by turning down again the tails, which were in the Phoenician originally vertical, but which had in the later Aramean scripts begun to curve towards the left, so that in form the final letters are a return to the more, archaic type. In the case of D the same process may not have been DESCEIPXION OP TEXT OF FIBST CENTDHT. 47 J adopted for fear of confusion with final f\. There seems to have been a disinclination to end a word with a stroke drawn to meet the next word. The final letters obviate this. 5. Origin of Final Letters. Before the end of the second century only one of the Jewish sages attempts to account for the genesis of the final consonants, Mathiah ben Harash (a pupil of R. Eleazar who died in the year 117 a. d.). He said that Moses received them on Mount Sinai; so, by the middle of tlie second century the final letters were regarded as of autliority. In the third century they wore credited to the pro- phets. The letters themselves are often referred to in the Talmud and by Jerome. The Samaritan Chronicle of the eleventh century says that Ezra not only changed the script but also added five new letters, that is, he invented the final forms. But the final consonants are not so old as the LXX translation — at least as parts of it. Frequently where that translation divides the words or verses differently from the Hebrew it is a question as to the place of one of the letters with final forms, whereas if such foiTUS had been in use there could have been no doubt as to wliich word the letters belonged to. A good example is Jer. 23, ss. The Hebrew has KtTD no HM,