CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BEQUEST WILLIAM P. CHAPMAN, Jn Class of 1895 1947 Cornell University Library BS525 .S66 1930 Ancient documents and *'!|f,,,'JJ,^ niE3-'3 -li^<^-J-lK Vnao "-n'T D'sn •^jin^ :?vi "'n> D'^'7^< -idn't • 'j'^n'T :^'p^^-J^^< a'.l'pN topi ' :D'q'7 d^d :'3 ^^y^!! a^an rni i?'pn^ nana ^toh? b^an r^i D\aiy rpi"? a^rt'^K Nip'T ' :p"''nn :i?''pn'p "^jro -At t - If „T •> ■ v: it':— i" • :r - 'a-t4t j- •• ^T r- . TV 'j T V . - , - - ,- ■ 't. vnN htt^a""? I D'rl'ps Nip'i '° :p"''n'"i nto:i'n laira'^D otiSn! n-}«i D';a:' kip a'an mpaj?i BOOK I. CHAPTER 1. HEBREW WRITING, EARLIER AND LATER I. Hebrew Writing. The reader is probably aware tbat the Old Testament, with some little exception,^ is written in Hebrew, the " holy tongue " of the Jews. It is a branch of the great Semitic family of languages, so called because the nations to which they belonged were considered to be chiefly the descendants of Shem (Gen. x. 21). The Syriac and Arabic represent other branches of the same great family, and the increasing knowledge of them in recent times has thrown a good deal of light upon the language of the Old Testament. On the opposite page we give a specimen from the first chapter of Genesis as it appears in an ordinary printed Hebrew Bible. Here is the first verse with its corresponding English — :'f-)nn nii^ u^av^rt n» DTi"?** una n*«>«i3 ' TT T >..t •*' r - T' A. «f JTT I " : .eartb the and heavens the Ood created beginning the Ib From this it will be seen that the language ia 1 Portion? of the Books of Ezra and Daniel, which are in Aramai% the couuuon dialect of Palestine after the Captivity. 2 HEBREW WRITING, EARLIER AND LATER. written backward, as we should say, i.e., from right to left. The pages are taken in the same order, the right hand before the left ; and therefore, in the reading of a Hebrew Bible (if it be not too Irish an expression to use), the beginning of the book is always at the end ! n. The Ancient Characters. Now this specimen of our present Hebrew Bible belongs to the later or Assyrian writing. The char- acters differ from those in which the books were originally written, much as the clear Roman type of our present Bible differs from the old black letter of Wycliff's and Tyndale's versions. The ancient Hebrew or Phoenician writing does not exist in any manu- script that has come down to us, though it is rather like the writing of the Samaritan Pentateuch, of which we shall bear farther on. We have some old coins of the time of Judas Maccabeus which present specimens of it. There is also the famous Moabite Stone, dis- covered some twenty years since, the actual old slab on which Mesha " the sheepmaster," king of Moab, 3000 years ago had inscribed in these ancient char- acters his own version of the fighting with Israel.' In the frontispiece is a photograph of this ancient in- scription, probably the very form in which the Ten Com- mandments were inscribed long ago on the two tables of ' See 2 Kings L I, iii. 4 ; 2 Ohron. zz., ius. HEBREW WRITING, EARLIER AND LATER. 3 stone on Mount SinaL A cast of it may be seen in any good library. And very recently, in a curions way, a new speci- men has come to light. One day, in the summer of 1880, a number of boys were playing about the Pool of Siloam near Jerusalem. There is at the upper end a tunnel cut out of the solid rock, by means of which the Pool is fed ; and one of the boys, while wading here, slipped and fell forward into the waters of the tunnel It was a fortunate fall for us, if not for the boy ; for, as he was recovering himself, his eye was caught by some marks like letters on a smooth part of the rock ; and on a fuller investigation afterwards by competent scholars, this was found to be an inscription by the workmen of the tunnel, written in ancient Hebrew characters somewhere about the year 700 B.C.* III. The Shaplra Manuscripts. A few years later, and it seemed as if even the fame of these discoveries was to be entirely eclipsed. In the August of 1883, an immense sensation was caused in the learned world by the announcement of a most wonderful "find" of ancient Hebrew manu- scripts in Palestine, — " the great climax," it was called, "of Biblical discovery." ^ An intereKting account of this inscription is given in the Biahop of Ussory's "Echoes of Bible History," whero it is shown that the tunnd was most probably that made by Hezekiah, when be "stopped the npper wivtercoiirss of Gihon and brought it straight down to the Oity of David." See 2 Chron. xxzii. 2-4, zxzii 3a 4 HEBREW WRITING, EARLIER AND LATER. It consisted of fifteen leather slips, black with ago as it would seem, and impregnated with the faint odour of funereal spices. They presented to the casual observer only the appearance of a plain oily surface, but on touching them with a brush dipped in spirits of wine, the strange old writing became visible, — forty columns of Deuteronomy in the ancient Hebrew characters, just like those on the Moabite Stone', and apparently dating from about the eighth or ninth century before Christ. These precious documents were brought to the British Museum by a Mr. Shapira, a dealer in old manuscripts, who had already procured through the Arabs many literary curiosities, and he estimated the value of this new-found treasore at one million pounds sterling 1 A council of the greatest experts in the kingdom assembled to investigate the matter, and Biblical scholars almost held their breath awaiting the momentous decision, the importance of which was vastly augmented by recent controversies as to the date, composition, and authorship of the Pentateuch. On Tuesday, August 2ist, the decision was an- nounced in a leading paragraph of the Times. The particulars of the investigation are extremely in- teresting, but the result only concerns us here. The Shapira bubble had burst! The much-talked of manuscript of the days of Jehoshaphat was found to have been written in the days of Victoria, one ai the cleverest literary swindles perhaps ever recorded. HEBREW WRITING, EARLIER AND LATER. J Thaa ended the Shapira "disooreiy." Sinoe that tiine nobody ventures to speak of the possibility of mannscripts yet existing in the ancient Hebrew writing. IV. The Handwriting of tlie Exiles. When did the change from these ancient characters to the present square writing take place ? That, reader, is not an easy question to answer. The Jews, of course, say in the days of Ezra. But the Jews have a trick of putting down to Ezra or to Moses every important event in the history of their Bible, so that this statement does not count for much. Probably the change was a gradual one, and began at or soon after the time of Ezra. The name of the new writing (Assyrian) would suggest that the Israel- ites brought it with them on their return &om the exile, though, on the other hand, a tradition that they did so may have given rise to the name. But in any case, there is little doubt that it was in full possession in the days of our Lord. An interesting confirmation of this is His expression that even " one Yod or one tittle should in no wise pass &om the law " (Matt. V. 1 8), implying that the Tod (the letter t) was the very smallest letter, as it is in the pre- sent writing, whereas in the old alphabet it was on« of the largest. The Samaritans still retain the ancient form «f 6 HEBREW WRITING, EARLIER AND LATER writing, or rather a modification of it, and have always been inclined to plnme themselves considerably on that fact. But the Jews do not care to be thus easily set down, and so the Babylonian Talmnd cleverly tnms the tables. " The law," it says, " was given to Israel in the holy tongne and in the ancient Hebrew writing. And it was given to them again in Ezra's days in the square Assyrian writing. The Israelites chose to themselves the holy tongue in the square writing, and left the old Hebrew writing to ignorant persons. But who are these idiots or ignorant persons ? Kabbi Chasda informs us — the Samaritans I " CHAPTER n. SOME PECULIARITIES OP HEBREW WRITING. I. Consonant*Writing. There are some peculiaritieB about the Hebrew lan- gnage which it is important the reader should know, that he may the better understand some of the ques- tions which are the subject of Old Testament Biblical criticism. The first is this, that the ffebrew alphabet, loth in its ancient amd in its present form, consists of consonants only. In the specimen given already, the little dots and marks underneath the letters represent the vowel sounds. But these marks are of comparatively modem date, certainly not older than about 500 or 600 a.d. In olden times the reader had only the consonants before him, and had therefore to supply the right vowel sounds himself in reading. It is easy to see how in such a case the same word might be differently read according to the different vowels supplied. For example, in English, B R n might be read b,rk, b„rn, b,^, BRtNy, b,k„n,, &c. ; and if there were no vowel marks to indicate the 8 SOME PECULIARITIES OP HEBREW WRITING. Bound, we shonld have to be taught, like the Jews, which word the writer intended. n. Curious Mistakes. We have many instances of this inconvenience after Hebrew had ceased to be a commonly spoken langaage. The great Oreek version of the Old Testament, the Septnagint, of which we shall hear later on/ is a case in point. It is full of discrepancies arising from this cause. Here, for example, are two Hebrew words in Deuteronomy, b z B and p 8 G H, which in oar Hebrew Bible read Bezer and Pisgah, but which the Septnagint translators render Bozor and Pasgah. St. Jerome {a.d. 400), commenting on Gen. xv. 1 1, says that his copy of the Septnagint, by supplying the wrong vowels, tells that Abram, instead of " driving the fowls away," as our Bible has it (v,Y,8H^ oT»m), actually " sat down with them " (v^y^hjb iT,m) ! Or would the reader like a more sensational example, though we scarcely care to vouch for its truth. Here is a story * in the Jewish Talmud, in a comment on I Kings xL 15, 16, where " Joab had smitten every male in Edom." When he returned from the slaughter into the I It is important that the leader shonld here impress this name on his memory, that it ma; convey a olear idea when he meets it again. For this pnrpose it might be well to glanoe forward for a moment to its story in Book IL p. 145. * The stoiy is tdd by Elias LsTita in bis "Massoretii Ham- ■assoreth," p. 128. SOME PECULIARITIES OF HEBREW WRITING: 9 presence of King David, " Why hast thou emitten them all ? " asked the king. "Because," replied the warrior, "so it is written, Thou shalt destroy every male " (z,k,b). " z K R ! " exclaimed the king, " we read it z,E^, every memory, every memorial of them." Joab was enraged. He went immediately to his Babbi, and angrily demanded, " How teachest thoa to read this word ? " " ZgKgR, memory," replied the Babbi. Joab drew his sword. " Why ? " asked the terrified teacher. " Because it is written, ' Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully ' " (Jer. xlviii. i o). The Babbi does not seem to have been at all sur- prised at this feat of quoting from a prophet who was not bom for many years after. He tried to argue his cafie, but all in vain. Joab was nothing if not scrip- tural. His quotations were as ready as those of Cromwell's Ironsides, and about as soothing too. " It is written also," he thundered, as he drew his flashing blade again, " Cursed is he that keepeth back his sword from blood ! " For the reader's comfort be it recorded that the historian leaves it an open question whether the un- fortunate tutor was let off, or whether his zealous pupil, by depriving him of his head, cured him for ever of false pronunciation. The story, in any case, will illustrate our point as to the possibility of error in Hebrew when written without vowels. M SOME PECULIARITIES OP HEBREW WRITING. m. How to Read without Vowels. To the English reader this consonant-writing would seem a very great danger to the purity of the Hebrew Scriptures, but the danger was really a very slight one &{teT all. In the first place, Eastern nations depended on the memory much more than on writings. The Jewish scribes could repeat whole books of their Scriptures with perfect ease, just as the Mohammedans repeat their Koran to-day. And thus the true read- ing of the Towelless words was handed down &om one generation to another. When a young Jewish pupil began to read the Scriptures, the page of consonant words was opened before him ; the scribe, his teacher, read over the words, and he repeated them after him, with their right pronunciation. His task, perhaps, might be expressed as a saying by heart with the help of the consonants. We Westerns have but little notion of the extraordinary powers in this respect possessed by the Eastern mind. To this day Oriental travellers express their wonder at the accu- racy with which the minutest details of a lesson can be reproduced long afterwards in the exact words of the teacher. But the great safeguard lay in the constitution of the language itself. In Hebrew, as in all Semitic dialects, the main root idea of a vxn-d wax quite in- telUffible from the amsonants aione. For example, SOME PECULIARITIES OF HEBREW WRITING, ii D B B represented the idea of speaking, and according to the different vowels supplied DaB^R, DjBgE, d„b^, Ac, would mean to speak, to say, to address, to converse with, to woo, to promise, to be promised; also, as a noun, a speaker, a word, a commandment, a proposal, a chronicle, and so on. But it may be objected, even with this root-idea expressed, how was the reader without vowel points to know the exact meaning intended, when each word might be read in so many different ways ? I answer, that even apart from the wonderful memory of the scholars, the context would, in almost every case, be a sufficient guide to any intelligent reader. No doubt it is possible to read a vowelless Hebrew word in different ways if it stamd alone ; but in its proper context it is quite a different matter. Even in Eng- lish, with the great disadvantage of having no fixed root meaning expressed by the consonants, vowelless words are often quite intelligible when read in their proper context • A rapid shorthand writer seldom puts in a vowel, and he can read his notes with ease long after they have been made. Or, to give an easier instance, suppose you have before you the Twenty- third Psalm without vowels — TH I^ED S M SHPHBD I SELL NT WNT H MKTH M T L DN N GBN PSTRS H LDTB M BSD TH STLL WTB8. When you have once been taught the true reading, 12 SOME PECULIARITIES OP HEBREW WRITINQ. if yon be ordinarily familiar with the passage, yon will have little or no difficulty in reading it again. Nay more, though each single word in it is capable of being differently read, yet let the experiment be tried, and you will find it almost impossible to make sense of these three lines if you put the wrong vowels to even a single word in them. In Hebrew, owing to its fixed root meanings, this is much more the case. Of course this is not always so. Very often difierent readings of a word will make equally good sense, and this is where the reader is entirely dependent on the Jewish tradition as handed down to us in the present vowel points. There is a good illustration in Gen. xlvii. 31, where "Israel bowed himself on the led's head" though the Epistle to the Hebrews (chap. xi. 21), quoting this verse from the Septnagint (Greek) translation, makes him bow "upon the top of his staff." The original word is hmtth. By the Hebrews it was read H^MjiTgH, the bed; by the Greek trans- lators, H^M^TTgH, the staff ; and it is very hard to say which is the correct reading. Both make equally good sense. Thus it will be seen how mistakes might occur through this method of consonant-writing, and the danger would, of course, be much increased if the old Hebrew manuscripts were written, as they probably were, like the old Greek ones.^ without any division ' The mistakes of the Septai^nt translation in dividingr what ought to be a singla word, or oonneoting into one words that onght to be teparate, give seTeral indications that tliis was so ; yet, on the other SOME PECULIARITIES OP HEBREW WRITING. 13 between the words. For example, as if we should write in English Gen. i. i : — HTHBQIOfMQODORTDTHHTNSNDTHRTH. The difficalty, however, is not of much practical importance. Indeed, so little is it felt, that to this day not only the Synagogue- roUs, but most modem Jewish writings, books, and newspapers are without the vowel points, and a Hebrew scholar can read them with perfect ease. If, in addition to what has been now said, the reader will keep in mind (i.) the scrupulous care of the Jews about the accurate reading of their Scriptures ; (2.) the fact that, being " people of one book," they were many of them as familiar with the words of their Bible as we are with those of the Lord's Prayer and the Greed; (3.) and that, besides this, there was, as we shall see, a special guild of scribes, at least from the time of Ezra, to preserve and hand down the correct reading, it will be easily seen that the danger from Hebrew consonant-writing is by no means as great as it appears at first sight. IV. Grammar and Theology. It is worth a short digression to tell of the sharp theological contests in Reformation days on this band, the Moabite Stone and the Siloam inicriptioni, which are verj ancient, have the wards separated by little round dots cut in the stone, as may be seen by examining frontispiece, and the same division exist* in the Pentateuch of the Samaritans. 14 SOME PECULIARITIES OP HEBREW WRITING. sabject of the Hebrew vowels. Nothing leas would suffice the Jewish commentators tmd grammarians of the time than that these vowel marks had been given, ii not to Adam in Paradise, certainly to Moses on Monnt Sinai, or, at the very utmost stretch of liberality, that they had been fixed by Ezra and "the men of the Great Synagogue." "They were a revelation from God ; " " the consonant letters were the body, and the vowel points the soul, and they move together as an army moves with its leader." Christian scholars knew little about the matter, and quite believed that the vowels were as ancient as the consonants. We can imagine then what a sensation was produced when Elias Levita, a very famous Hebrew scholar, about the year 1540, proved to the world that these vowel marks were not in existence for hundreds of years after the time of our Lord ! * Here was a new apple of discord in the already sufficiently discordant field of controversy, whose noise was filling the world in those Beformation days. It is hard to seek the truth dispassionately at such times. Though Luther and Calvin held to the old opinion, the Protestants in general thought they saw a weapon for themselves in Levita's discovery, and, carried away by their theological bias, they sided largely with the new doctrine, and disclaimed the antiquity of the vowel points. Thus they considered they were leaving them- selves freer in the interpretation of the Old Testa- ment, throwing off the tradition of the Rabbis, as they ' See footnote, chap, viii. p. 98. SOME PECULIARITIES OP HEBREW WRITINO. IJ had already thrown o£F tiie traditioii of the Fath^^ l which differ only in the length of the tail The first is the letter Tod, referred to in Matt. V. 1 8, and corresponds to our T. The other is the Hebrew w. Clearly, in copying a long di£5cblt manuscript one of these letters might easily be written for the other. A good instance occurs in Ps. xxii. 1 6, "They pierced my hands and my feet," where this mistake has been the subject of many a controversy (see specimen, p. 200). Another pair of these similar letters is T and ^, dif- fering only in the rounding of the angle. They corre- spond to our H and D. They are responsible for a curi- ous little slip, which the Bevisers seem not to have noticed, in Gen. z. 3, 4, and I Chron. i. 6, 7. In the first we read Biphat and Dodanim, in the other Diphat and Bodanim. '^ But, indeed, they ase responsible for a great many slips. I doubt if there is a more mischievoua pair of letters in any alphabet in the world than this same pair. They are continually being mistaken one for the other. There is a disputed reading in 2 Sam. viii. 13, which interestingly exhibits this confusion. It tells of David " smiting of Syria in the Valley of 8alt ei^^hteen thousand men. And he put garri- SOME PECULIARITIES OP HEBREW WRITING. 17 Bons in Edom." Now this is almost certainly a mistake, even thongh the BeviBers have not corrected it. For the word " Syria " we should read " Edom." The Valley of Salt was in the neighbourhood of Edom, not Syria ; and if we tnrn to the parallel passage in I Ghron. xviii. 1 2, we read tht^ " Abishai the son of Zeruiah smote of Edom in the YaDey of Salt eighteen thousand men. And he put garrisons in Edom." The title also of Ps. Iz. tells that it was snng when Joab returned, and smote Edom in the Valley of Salt. Now how did this error arise ? The words Syria and Edom do not seem very likely to be mistaken one for the other. Bat here are the Hebrew forms — onn = A B»M = Syria. DTK = A,D^ = Edom. It will be seen how easily " Edom " might have become " Syria " by the scribe slightly rounding the angle of theT The Septuagint version has a very curious instance of this error. In i Sam. ziz. 13, where Michal, to &cilitate her husband's escape, put an image in the bed and at its head " a pillow of goats " (hair), the Septuagint translators have " Michal put at his head a Iwer of goats." This shows that they read Kaihed, a liver, instead of KdMr, a pillow, confusing the final d and r. Curiously enough, Josephns^^ follows them in this. " MiGhal," he says, " having let David down ' Ant Tt II, 4. i8 SOME PBCVLIARITJBS OP HEBREW WRITING. by a cord ont of a window, fitted np a eick bed for him, and ptU under the bed-elothes a goat't liver, and made them believe, by the leaping of the liver, which oansed the bed-clothea to move also, that David breathed like an asthmatic man ! " There are also other similar pairs D 3 E B, J ^ o K, n f! H CH, any of which might by a little carelessness in writing lead to a good deal of confusion ; ^ bat there is no need of illnstrating further. I have dealt here only with the more modem writing, but when it is added that in the ancient writing also this similarity existed between certain pairs of letters, the reader will understand how, in the long course of ages, errors might easily occur, even with the most anxious care about the accuracy of the text. VI. The "Guardians of the Lines." The ancient scribes, too, had a peculiar habit in writing their manuscripts. In our writing, if a word near the end of the line is too long, we carry part on to the next line, with a hyphen connecting. They never did that. If they were near the end of the line, and the next word was a little too long, they ' A {riend has jnat pointed oat to me ui nnintentional illnatratioa of thii dangOT in the ipecimen of Hebrew facing p. i, where the printer hu put in the bottom line Kip in mistake for KTp and two Unas higher uf nns instead of inK being misled by the similarity of the middle letters. I leara tiie error onooneoted. SOME PECULIARITIES OP HEBREW WRITINO. 19 took it down nnbroken to the line below. But it would not do to leave the blank thus caused at the end of the line. So they filled it up with some other letters, usually those at the beginning of the long word that had been moved down. These letters are called the " Guardians of the Lines." There was just a chance, of course, that a stupid copyist might some- times blunder over these, especially if the letters could by any possibility be mistaken for any part of the previous word, and so errors might arise in the manuscripts. Sometimes also a word of frequent occurrence was abbreviated by writing only the first letters, with a few small dashes after it to mark the abbreviation. As, for example, the word YEHOVAH appeared some- times as Y". The Septuagint version was thns led into a mistake in translating Jer. vL II, where it found OHAHiTH YEHOVAH, "the wrath of Jehovah," contracted into ghamath y". This is very like the form chamathy, which means " my wrath," and they accordingly so translate it. CHAPTER in. WHAT IS TEXTUAL CRITICISM f Mistakes in the Manuscr!pt& The sources of error mentioned in the previoaa chapter are peculiar to the Old Testament manuscripta But besides those, they were exposed to other sources of error, in common with ail manuscripts that have been extensively copied. However careful the scribe may be, it is almost impossible in copying any long difficult manuscript to escape errors of various kinds. Sometimes he will mistake one word for another that looks very like it ; sometimes, if having the manuscript read to him, he will confound two words of similar sound ; sometimes, after writing in the last word of a line or period, on looking up again, his eye will catch the same word at the end of the next line or period, and he will go on &om that, omitting the whole pas- sage between. This last is a very frequent fault. Remarks and explanations, too, written in the margin, will sometimes in transcribing get inserted in the text. Again, in ancient mannacripts, where there is often BO divinon between the words, each line presenting a WHAT IS BIBLICAL CRITICISM f 91 continnons row of letters, it might easilj happen that one word would be wrongly divided into two, or two combined into one, as in the old story of the infidel who wrote over his bed " God is nowhere," which was read by his little boy as " God is now here." For example, in the end of Pa. xlviii. 14, " This God is oar God for ever and ever: He will be our guide anto death," some Hebrew manuscripts have HL-mth = vm^o death, others hlmth =/or ever. There is no need of farther parsoing this snbject, The reader who remembers his own frequent slips and erasures, even in writing an ordinary short letter, will easily think of many ways besides in which errors may arise, and will see at once the improbability of the Old Testament manuscripts having escaped abso- lutely flawless through a transmission of thousands of years. If, even with all the advantages of the print- ing-press and its multitudes of trained proof-readers, many discrepancies exist between the different editions of our Authorised Version, how can we wonder that it should be so when every copy had to be made by the slow laborious process of writing it out letter by letter ? True, God might have quite obviated this danger. He might have miraculously preserved the original autographs of the inspired writers as a standard by which copies could be corrected for ever, or He might have directed the minds and fingers of Bible-copyists before printing was invented, and of printers and compositors in after days, so as to secure this perfect transmisdion. If He had seen fit thus to make fallible 22 WHAT IS BIBLICAL CRITICISM T men infallible, of conrse He could h&ve done so. But it does not seem to be God's way anywhere to work miracles for men where their own careful use of the abilities He has given would suffice for the purpose. And the Old Testament text is no exception to this rule. We shall find, as we go on, that never was a book guarded with such scrupulous awe and reverence ; never did any writing come down through the ages so pure as we have reason to believe did our Hebrew Bible ; but that it has come to us word for word as it left the hands of the inspired writers long ago, the evidence will by no means allow us to believe. n. Biblical Criticism. Biblical criticism is the science which deals with the discovering and correcting of these errors in the text. To be accurate, it should rather be called Textual Criticism, for of course it deals equally with the text ol any manuscript, whether Biblical or not, and I shall generally use this more accurate term in future. The reader must not be frightened at the hard name of this science, as if it meant something abstruse and difficult to nnderstand. It may sometimes mean what is very simple indeed, and instances of it may occur even in the reading of the daily newspaper. For example, I remember somewhere reading of a naval pensioners' banquet, at which the toast was proposed, " That the WHAT IS BIBLICAL CRITICISM f 23 man who has lost one eye in the service of his country may never see with the other." Well, it did not require mnoh cleverness to suspect a mistake here, and to think of examining another account, and find that the word " distress " or some such word had been omitted from the text. Yet this was an operation in textual criticism, though certainly an operation of the most simple kind. One^rather like it in the Bible, but very much more diflBcult, occurred in the revision of the well-known First Lesson for Christmas Day (Isa. ix.) The old reading is (verse 3), " Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy ; they joy before Thee according to the joy in harvest," &c. Now, in a jubilant passage of this kind, the " not increased their joy " rather jars on one, and this fact led to the examining of a great many old manuscripts and versions of Isaiah, when it was found by -the Eevisers that the word " not " was most probably a copyist's mistake (see specimen, Book iii p. 202). But the operations of textaal criticism are not always by any means so simple as this. Sometimes the highest skill of the most experienced critics ia utterly at fault. And even in cases like those given above, sifiiple as they seem, the making of such correc- tions is often a very dangerous experiment. For an expression may seem to the critic incongruous or im» probable through his misapprehending . the thought that was in the writer's mind. If, then, he should find a number of ancient manuscripts which, owing to the samo misapprehension, have ventared to so alter 14 WHAT IS BIBLICAL CRITICISM t the passage that it agrees with his view, he is clearly in danger of being confirmed in his mistake. Thus it will be seen teztnal criticism needs to be wisely and cantionsly used. It is an "edge tool," which, the proverb says, children and fools must not play with — many such have played with it to the sore disfiguring of their work — but which in the hands of the skilfal workman may do much, and has done much, especially during the past century, in removing blemishes from the Bible text. In applying to the Bible, it requires a calm judicial mind, reverent towards God's Word, skilled in the accurate weighing of evidence, and through long study of manuscripts well acquainted with the many ways in which copyists' errors are likely to arise. m. Its Axioms and Rules. Its rules, even when they seem to the uninitiated difiScult and unreasonable, are simply the conclusions of common sense founded on a special knowledge of the subject. For example, that in certain cases where we have to decide between two difierent readings of a passage, " the more difficult reading is to be •preferred to the easier" merely means that experience of manu- scripts has taught the critic that copyists are more likely to try to simplify a difficult passage than to complicate one that already runs freely and easily, and therefore the more difficult reading is likely to be WHAT IS BIBLICAL CRITICISM f a| the oorrect one.^ So also the mle that " tJie shorttr of two rtadingt »» to be pre/erred to the more wordy," means only that experience has likewise tanght that copyiBts are more inclined to expand a short terse reading than to condense a more wordy one. For our present inquiry it is only necessary to trouble the reader with three very simple and self- evident propositions of textual criticism : — (l.) If manuseriptB were ail of equal value, the truth might be expected, of eov/rse, to be with the majority — e.ff., if out of seventy manuscripts, sixty contained a certain reading and ten omitted it, that reading would probably be correct. (2.) But marmscripts are not all of the same value. For illustration, let o represent the original document, and A and B copies of equal value made from it. Now suppose three copies further to be made from B and from these again any numbers of others. It is clear that the evidence of the one copy. A, would be worth that of the whole set, 0, d, e, i, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, copies descended from b. I |c Id |e n III I a 3 4 5 ' For example, I am informed that in the hymn " Rook of Agei," the line " when mine eyelids oloie in death " reads in lome copies " when mine eyestrings barst In death," This is dearly the more " difficult " reading, bat for that reason it is the most likely to be the original one, since nobody would bs likely to alter the other for snoh an unpleasant reading, but any one might be tempted to change It for the other. s6 WHAT IS BIBLICAL CRITICISM t (3.) The earlier any marmscript, the more likely it it to be correct. For in the many ways we have referred to, it is possible for errors to creep into the first copy of a mannscript. Any such errors would, of course, be repeated by the man that afterwards copied from this, who would also sometimes add other errors of his own. This would be equally true of the man who copied from him, and so on all the way down. So that clearly as copies increased errors would be likely to increase with them, and therefore, as a general rule, the earlier manuscripts would be the more correct onea.' IV. Its Working Material. The evidence on which the textual criticism of the Old Testament chiefly bases its judgments I have roughly divided into two parts : — I. The Old Hebrew Manuscripts, i.e., copies of the Sacred Books made in the original language. These are the foundation on which everything rests. II. The Other Old Docdments to aid in the testing and correcting of these manuscripts. Under this head come — (i.) The Ancient Versions, i.e., the translations of the Hebrew books into other languages long ago. (2.) The quotations from the Bible in ancient Jewish commentaries, to which we may add ' Of course this ia only a general mle. It is quite possible that a manuscript of the present year should be copied direct from one 1 500 /ears old, and therefore be more correct than many which hare existed for ueaturieg. WHAT IS BIBLICAL CRITICISM t 9f the earlier printed editions of the Hebrew Bible, mado perhaps from older manoBcripts than any that hav» BQrvived. Accordingly this rolame is divided into three parts- Book I. The " Old Hebrew Doeaments," and the ques- tion of Biblical CriticiBm. Book n. The " Other Old Documents," and their aid in Biblical Criticism. Book lU. The New Bible a specimen of Biblical Criticism, to illustrate how the above materials are used in removing blem- ishes from the Bible text OHAPTEB 17. A VIEW OF THE OLD MANUSCRIPTS. Some Curious Old Manuscripts. We are now in a position to glance at the old Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible at present available to scholars. There are very many of them — nearly two thousand have already been examined — strange and curi- ous old documents, on rough cumbrous hides, on brown African skins, on rolls of the most delicate parchment, some of them mildewed and faded and torn, some almost as fresh as on the day when they were made. From all quarters of the earth they come, from Pales- tine and Babylon and the distant East, from Africa and the islands of the Indian Sea, from the great universities and libraries of the Gentiles, from the filthy Jewish Ghettos in Italy and Spain. There are the fine synagogue parchments, with their exquisite writing wrought out with continual fasting and prayer ; here the curious manuscripts of the Babbis of China, and the rough red goatskin rolls from the black Jews of Malabar ; ^ piles of shrivelled fragments of only a ' In the -early times then were Jewish settlements in India and Ohina, and Hebrew soholan often turned their attention in that direo- _ -3 J ■f-.y- 5J 5" i H -1 '/ iv 'i £3 II- *^«r- A VIEW OP THE OLD MANUSCRIPTS. 29 few pages, and rough leathern rolls 150 feet long; beautiful book-shaped copies of the Law, and soiled and faded sheets of the Prophets and the Psalms, disinterred from the " Ohenizas," where the Jews had buried them. Many a romantic storj doubtless belongs to the history of these silent sheets and the names of the forgotten writers, which some of them bear. Stories of battle and siege, as of the capture of Toledo by Edward the Black Prince, where the famous " Codex Ezras " ' was found amongst the spoils ; stories of life in the old Jewish academies long ago ; stories of fieroe persecution, of brave endurance ; of men fleeing with their scriptures from the " followers of Christ ; " of holocausts of ancient Jewish manuscripts of the Bible ; of blazing synagogues and ruined homes, " And dead white faces upturned to the sky, Calling foi vengeance to their fathers' God." tion. In 1806 Dr. Bnchftnan obtained, among other mannscripta, a roll of the Fentatench from the black Jews of Malabar. It is now in the Universitj Library at Cambridge. Jt conaisti of about thirty-fire goatikius dyed red. It is the breadth of the Jewish sacred cubit, and when complete must have been nearly ninety feet long. ' The Jews of Toledo, in the Middle Ages, bad in their synagogues a roll called the Codez Ezrte, or the Oodex Azarse. Some belieTsd it to have belonged te Ezra ; others thought it was the copy deposited in the'Azara or Hall of the Temple (see p. 81), and preserred in the siege and capture of Jerusalem. At the capture of Toledo by Edward the Black Prince in 1367, it came into his possession as part of the spoils. The Jews redeemed it for a large sum, but it wm afterwards destroyed by fire with the synagogue. So highly was it valued, that manuscripts were sent from all places to be compared with it, and some of our existing manuscripts have appended to them a certificate that they have been compared, not directly with the Codex Ezrce itself, but witk manuscripts that bad been verified by comparison with it. JO A VIEW OP THE OLD MANUSCRIPTS. Bnt the very exiatence itself of these manascripts has sufficient in it of wonder and romance. Thej are the holy oracles of God written in the " holy tongue " of His people, faithfully handed down firom generation to generation since the days of the thunderings and lightnings of Sinai. Who can look on them without reverence and awe and deep conviction of the truth of revelation ? Who can think without emotion of that poor, despised, hunted race, through all the ages pre- serving for their persecutors the message of Jehovah ? Surely enough of wonder and romance that those records should have come down to us from far back ages; that in this world of shortlived races, rapidly succeeding each other and passing away, there should remain one mysterious people existing to this day from the dawn of history, the guardians through thirty cen- turies of the words in those old Hebrew scrolls t n. A Perplexing Discovery. But what is the value to the textual critic of these venerable documents ? How many thousand years do they go back ? Have we amongst them the autograph of any inspired writer? Have we manuscripts at least of the time of our Lord? How far do they enable as to fix with certainty the exact original of the Hebrew Old Testament ? To the reader who knows something of the New Testament writings, with their docomenta reaching up A VIEW OP THE OLD MANUSCRIPTS. 31 near the days of the Apostles, and the many variationa nevertheless existing in the text, an acquaintance with these strange old manuscripts can scarcely fail to cause surprise. Not one of them, we shall see immediately, is written in the ancient writing. This, perhaps, he might have expected from what has been already said. But, as he inquires further, a very perplexing fact indeed reveals itself. He finds — I. That the oldest Hebrew manusckipt in exist- ence IS OF DATE little EAfiLIEB THAN WiLLLiM THE CONQUEROB ! II. Am) THAT IN ALL THE HEBREW MANUSCRIPTS THAT HAVE EVER BEEN EXAMINED, THE TEXT 18 ALMOST WORD FOR WORD THE SAME ! Let US realise what this means, (i.) That of the early Old Testament books, written nearly 3000 years ago, we have not a single copy 1000 years old; or, in other words, that the earliest Old Testament manu- script existing is nearly as far from the time of the original writers as would be a New Testament manu- script written to-day. (2.) That amid all the copyists' errors and variations, which are the common fate of every ancient book — the New Testament included — this most ancient of all the books of the world has virtually no variations at all ! m. The Guardianship of the Bible. Now, how are these strange phenomena to be explained? This question will be fully treated in ja A VIEW OP THS OLD MANUSCRIPTS. the following etoiy of the mannscripts, but a brief summary of the answer here will perhaps enable the reader to follow it more intelligentlj. The popular notion is that of an absolutely perfect guardianship of the Hebrew text by the Jews. Their deep reverence for their Scriptures and the scrupulous care with which these Scriptures were handed down is considered quite sufficient explanation for this marvellous agree- ment of manuscripts. Well, there is much truth in this, a good deal more, we venture to say, than ia believed by many of those who question the accuracy of the Hebrew Old Testament. We shall see as we go on that for nearly 2000 years past at least this guardianship was almost perfect ; scarcely a single important slip of a transcriber could have occurred without detection in all the copying of manuscripts during that time. But we cannot speak thus con- fidently of the manuscripts of the earlier period. They certainly were not all uniform. The manuscripts used by the Palestine Jews varied, often considerably, from those of the " Jews of the Dispersion " in other landSt The Palestine manuscripts themselves had some varia« tions between them. Therefore some better explana* tion must be found for the aniformity in the ezistin Hebrew manuscripts, IV. An Ancient Revision. We must first clearly distingnish between the Pales- tine mannsoripta and all others. The Palestine text A VIEW OF THE OLD MANUSCRIPTS. 33 is that which has come down to ub, and, as will be seen, we hare every reason to consider that it has come down to ns substantially correct. We do not believe that it is entirely free from copyists' errors, but from what we know of the solemn reverence with which it has been always regarded from the beginning, and the scrupalons, almost superstitions care with which it has been transmitted for the past two thousand years, we have ample reason to believe that this Pales- tine Old Testament has come down to us very nearly as it left the hands of the original writera This, however, does not sufficiently account for the almost word-for-word agreement between our existing manuscripts, since, as we have seen, even the Palestine manuscripts in ancient times were not without some variation. Unless by a continual miracle, no writings could have passed through the process of copying and recopying for thousands of years without many an error and variation arising. The explanation is by no means easy to find. The following chapters will tell of a long continual revision carried on through many centuries by the ablest Jewish scholars ; of a mysterious standard text set up, to which every manuscript conformed; of the existence of all Hebrew Bibles in the famous " days of the Massoretes " in this uniform state in which they appear to-day. This uniform text was then fixed and stereotyped aa the " TextuB Beceptns " or standard text of the Old Testament. It is known as the "Massoretic" text, and our manuscripta are all " Massoretic " manuscripts. 34 A VIEW OF THE OLD MANUSCRIPTS. It is well for the reader to remember this name. We have much to eay of it afterwards in the " Story of the ManaBcript* " The Vanished Manuscripts. But what of the disappearance of the very ancient mannscriptB ? Why have we none even a thousand years old ? If divergent copies once existed, why is there not one to be found to-day to break the uni- formity of the Massoretic text ? It is generally an- swered that the Jews destroyed all copies that varied from the standard Massoretic Bible. And this may well have been so. We know that in a like case, when the Caliph Othman adopted a standard text of the Koran, he destroyed every copy that differed from it. The text of the Vedas, too, in India, appears to have been revised about five hundred years before Christ, and no divergent copy allowed afterwards to remain. This may have happened in the case of the ancient Jewish manuscripts. But there is really no need of postulating such a cause. Why should they not have vanished as Jewish manuscripts are continually vanishing now ? If the present Jewish customs existed long ago, they must have made the survival of any very ancient manuscript well nigh impossible. Even those which we possess to-day have only escaped through having fallen into Gentile hands. It is a rigid role to this day among ;a"-3U3— "*■7TV^-" -^V'^'^'JJ-^ 1^":>-ytory ia transferred to a later period. 46 THE STORY OP THE MANUSCRIPTS. its text has never since been inflaenced by that of the Jewish Pentateuch; there- / fore the whole portion in g : which it and our Jewish ^ ;■ manascripts of the Pen- 1: tatench agree, and that S :' means sabstantiallj al- most the entire contents, 7^. must certainly belong to / \ the "Early Ages" Bible. / \ There is no other way pos- / • eible of explaining their \ agreement. So that, it • \ will be seen, thdt Samari- ! \ tan Pentateuch is a most : \ important vdtMss to the substantial purity of our present text. Bnt then the Samari- tan, in certain particulars, is found to differ from our text. The ages of the patriarchs do not agree ; the name Ebal, in Deut. xxvii. 4, appears as Qerizim — though this is of little moment, it is so evidently a corruption in favour of the Samaritan temple there ; the narrative is fuller in many particulars, and there are expansions and explanations of passages which seem conclensed and difficult in the Jewish Bible. Now, it has been argued by some that these dis- THB EARLY AOBS. 47 orepancies go far to show that at the close of the Early Ages, when the Samaritan branched off, similar discrepancies mnst have existed between the early manuscripts ; that the Samaritan was copied from one set of mannscripts, the Jewish from another and dif- ferent set. If we were as snre of aooarate transmission in the case of the Samaritan as we are in that of the Jewish Scriptures, this would be a good argument When the manuscripts of this Samaritan Pentateuch were first imported into Europe in the seventeenth cen- tury, much surprise was felt at its variations from the Hebrew, and scholars were at first inclined to give it a high position. But, on fuller acquaintance, it quite lost its character, as the reader will see for himself later on. SufiSce it to say here, that it now stands convicted of having been freely tampered with, not only for contro- versial purposes, as in the case of Ebal and Gerizim, but also in many places to remove what seemed difiBcnlties, and to make the narrative flow more freely and easily. Therefore we conclude that onr Samaritan witness is not of sufficiently good character ; and that, while its substantial agreement with the Massoretic mann- scripts is a strong confirmation of their correctness, its charge of minor inaccuracies in these Hebrew manu- scripts, or of discrepancies existing in the Early Ages, is, as the Scotch lawyers would say, " not proven." At the same time, some of its variations are sup- ported by the authority of the Septuagint and other versions of the following period, and it would be a 4S THE STORY OP THE MANUSCRIPTS. bold thing to say that in every little discrepancy between them the Jewish Bible is certainly right and the Samaritan certainly wrong. There are some few instances at least where we may well doubt this. For example, we give amongst the " Specimens " in Book ill. p. 1 84 a Samaritan addition to the text of Gen. iv. 8 which is strongly supported by other authority, and is admitted by the recent revisers into their margin : " Cain said to Abel his brother, Let ua go into the field." We have shown in that place that the Samaritan is very probably right, and that the words may have at some time fallen out of the Hebrew text. In Gen. xlvii. 21 it is almost certainly right in telling that Joseph made bondmen of the Egyptians for Pharaoh (see Revised Version, margin), instead of merely " removing " them, as we have it. But we only listen to it here because other autho- rities strongly support it. We repeat again that its variations from the Hebrew carry little or no weight with them. Like all other such witnesses, it has to suffer for its general bad character even where it may be in the right. No scholar would now think of using its unsupported testimony to call in question the accuracy of the Hebrew text. VI. Cross-Examine our First Witness. There seems just one other possible way of learning anything as to the manuscripts of the Early Ages, C I,/ ?' r g^ I THE EARLY AGES. 49 and that is by crosa-exanuiiiiig, as it were, our first witness, the existing Old Testament itself. There is a certain dass of evidenqe found within its covers which is sometimes brought forward as a proof that in the Early Ages, before the separate books were collected into one Jewish " Bible," and the Canon of the Old Testament closed, the manuscripts must have suffered from careless transcription. It is that of " repeated passages." What seem to be copies of the same writings are found in two or more difiFerent places, and these passages, when closely compared, are found to exhibit variations of more or less importance. Compare, for example : — 2 Sam. xxii. with Ps. xviii. Ps. xiv. „ Ps. liii. I Chr. xvi. 8-22 ,, Ps. cv. 1-15. 1 Chr. xvi. 23-33 )j Ps. fcvi. 2 Kings xix., xx. „ Isa. xxxvii., xxxviii. 2 Kings XXV. „ Jer. lii. Isa. XV., xvi. „ Jer. xlviii. There are nearly a hundred such instances of parallelism in the Old Testament, easily discovered by means of a good Beference Bible ; and to understand aright the value of their evidence, the reader should examine a few of them for himself before going on. However, as one cannot trust all readers to take this trouble, perhaps we had better print one or two illuth JO THE STORY OP THE MANUSCRIPTS. trationB. Let us take at in the above list : — a Sam. xm. random the first two pairs The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and dsliverer ; The God of my rook ; in Him will I trust: My shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge, my Saviour ; Thou lavest me from vlolenoe. I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised : So shall I M saved from mine enemies. When the vavM of death com- passed me, The flood* ol ungodliness made me afraid ; The cords of Shad were round about me ; The inaras of death oau* upon me. In my dlstrais I called upon the Lord, Yea, I called unto my Ood, Pbm;H xTm. I love Thet, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rook, and my fortress, and deliverer ; My Qod, my strong rook ; in Him will I trust: My shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower. I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised : So shall I M saved from mine enemies. The oordi of death compassed me, And the floods of ungodliness made me afraid. The cords of Sheol were round about me ; The palna of death oama upon me. In my distress I called upon the Lord, And cried unto my Qod, And He rod* upon a cherub and did fly ; Yea, He was Men upon the wings of the wind. And He made darkness pavilions round about Him. PsALH zrr. The fool hath said in hta heart, There is no God. They are aomipt ; they have done abominable works ; There is none that doeth good. The LOHD looked down from heaven upon the children of men. To see if there were any that . Ixxix,, most probably written at this period. THE MEN OP THE GREAT SYNAGOGUE. 71 of the Maccabean days, curdling one's very blood with horror, while yet making every nerve thrill high with the fierce excitement of battle and revenge I In the pages of Josephas, in the Books of the Maccabees, find the story, and study it for yourself, my reader — the invasion of Antioohus, the mad Syrian king ; the raid not chiefiy against city and people, but against God and religion and the holy manuscripts, the most sacred treasure of the Jewish race. Bead of the patriots turning at bay, of the town and Temple walls bespattered with blood, of Bibles torn asunder and burned in the fire, of the fierce rage of men, of the wailing of women, of the great sow slaughtered in insult in the Temple itself, and the broth of its filthy fiesh sprinkled, amid shouts of laughter, on the sacred parchments ! ' Look to the heights at the battle of Emmaus, where fierce Judas the Maccabee prepares for re- venge; see the mourners in sackcloth calling upon God, spreading out in the sunlight before Him the charred and torn fragments of their holy books, defiled by touch of the accursed Greeks, and painted all over in wanton iiisult with the obscene figures of their heathen gods.^ Ay, and though it does not concern this history, look a little longer still ; hear the fierce trumpet-blast of Israel's host; see the stem warriors sweeping down from the hills crying for vengeance to the God of Sabaoth. Enough of the wild story, I Josephus, Antiquities, zii. 5, 4 ; Diod. Sic, xzziv. I, ' I Maccabees iii, 46-5% 7a THE STORY OF THE MANUSCRIPTS. Full well that day did iiey avenge their wrongs, when the blood of a thousand of the Syrian host atoned for the swine-broth sprinkled on the Bible. What would the world do, men ask? if it lost the Bible ? Did you ever think, did you ever know, reader, how nearly, humanly speaking, the world had lost it — the Old Testament at least, and all of the New which was quarried from the old ? The destruc- tion of a few parchments flung into the fire meant very little for the Syrian soldiers ; for us it went perilously nigh to mean the Hebrew Bible swept away for ever ! Nor was the danger over then. Solemnly, lovingly, as the relics of the dead, were these sacred remnants cherished by the nation, and new fair copies soon replaced the old, copies perhaps honoured by the touch of Christ. And then — another scene of horror, another time of peril to the holy books, and Jerusalem was captured, and the Temple lay in ruins, and in the pile of the proud Romans' trophies lay the Temple manuscript of the Books of Moses. ^ And yet again, a half-century later, in the final struggle of the Jews at Bethur, when Scribes and manuscripts together were flung in hundreds into the raging flames. Surely a higher than human care was guarding that old Hebrew Bible ! * Josephus, Jewish Wars, rii 5. J, CHAPTER Vn. THE STORY OF THE MANUSCRIPTS. THE TALMUD PERIOD. I. The College of Tiberias. With the destruction of Jerasalem begins a new era in the " Story of the Hebrew Manuscripts." The State was broken up ; the Temple was in ruins ; it seemed as if all now might well be at an end. But no. From the moment that their national life died out at the destruction of the holy city, the Jews, with nothing left to live for in the present, threw themselves heart and soul into the preservation of the relics of their glorious past. The sacred writings were everything to them — their title-deeds, their national records, their covenant with Jehovah. And so upon the sacred writings their attention was centred with an earnest- ness such as never had been known before. Religion and patriotism united to inspire their reverence. Every word, every letter, became holy in their eyes. Quickly the centres of learning grew for the study of the Hebrew Scriptures. At Japhneh, at Lydda. 74 THE STORY OP THE MANUSCRIPTS. at CBBsarea, famous academies arose where grammar and criticism and interpretation were taught. But famous above all were the schools of Tiberias looking out on the waters of the sacred lake. Travellers who now visit the decaying little town remind us of the gloiy of its ancient days — of turret and dome and sculptured figure — of Herod's golden palace flashing in the sun. Seldom do we hear of the greater glory, when Herod and his golden palace were forgotten, when earnest students paced its terraced paths in high communings with the sages of their people, when its archives were the treasuries of Biblical lore, and the fame of its great schools was spread throughout the Jewish world. It was the last retreat of old Judaism in Palestine before the advancing wave of Christianity. The Jewish element reigned supreme. Not heathen or Samaritan or dog of a Christian could find a resting-place within its walls. It was the great university of the Hebrew world, and many a glorious name figured on its roll. Rabbi Judah the Holy was one of its teachers, and Rabbi Johanan of Talmud fame, Aquila and Symma- chus, the great Bible translators,' were pupils in its halls of the Rabbi Akiba, whose life-story forms one of the most romantic chapters in the whole of the Hebrew literature. And even when its golden days were over, when, retreating before the spread of Chris- tianity, it had sent forth its greatest students into other lands, the glory of the old acftdemy lived again ' S«e Book H. p. 1^6. THE TALMUD PERIOD. 75 in the gloiy of her children, and Tiberias was almost eclipsed by the Babylon schools on the banks of the far Euphrates. The Makers of the Talmud. In almost every Jewish academy the whole course of study was connected with the Scriptures, especially with the Mosaic books. When Rabbi Ishmael was asked at what time the " Greek wisdom " might be studied, " At some hour," said he, " which is neither day nor night, for it is written concerning the Book of the Law, ' Day and night thou shalt meditate therein ' " (Joshua i. 8). It was not altogether, though, such a study as we should approve of. Much attention was given to the traditional explanations of the Torah or Law of Moses, and the systematic collection of these traditions into what was called the Mishna. In course of time, fear- ing lest this oral Mishna should become lost or cor- rupted, it was committed to writing, chiefly under the care of Babbi Judah and his confrSres in the College of Tiberias. And then there grew to it a series of commentaries or " Gemaras," both in Palestine and Babylon, till at length these increasing " traditions of men " about the Scriptures threatened to bury altogether the Scriptures themselves. The Mishna, together with its Gemara or commentary, made up what is called The Talmud. And by degrees this Talmud grew to be 76 THE STORY OF THE MANUSCRIPTS. to them more important than the Soriptures them- selves. " He that is learned in the Scriptures," said they, " and not in the Mishna, is a blockhead. The Law was given to Moses by day, the Mishna by night. The Law is like salt, the Mishna like pepper, the Gemara like balmy spice." And thus their devo- tion to the Talmud became the very curse of Judaism. Professing to be the hedge and safeguard of the Scriptures, it was really " making void the Word of God by its tradition, teaching for doctrines the com- mandments of men." m. Their " Biblical Criticism." Fault-finding, however, is an ungracious task, espe- cially with men to whom we owe so much as we do to the Talmud Scribes. The making of the Talmud — we shall hear more of it hereafter — was but part of their work. For the other part — their critical care of the Hebrew text — the world cannot be too thankful. It is not easy to define exactly what they accom- plished, for the work, as we have seen, was begun by the Scribes, in the period before them, and finished long afterwards in the days of the Massorets. They did not attempt anything like a regular revision. They marked certain readings that seemed to them doubtful. If they met with a clear mistake they cor- rected it in the margin, but seldom or never meddled with the text. They gave minute directions about THE TALMUD PERIOD. 77 oopjrmg of manuscripts and cantions about such errors as similar letters. They counted the number of verses and words in each book in order to preserve it from future corruption. They recorded, but in a rambling, unmethodical way, the textual notes of their prede- cessors for centuries before. The Talmud contains many traces of their rough- and-ready method of Biblical criticism. It enumerates certain words which they found in their Bible manu- scripts with a little mark already placed over them, thus showing us that at least some rude sort of textual criticism existed even before their days. These same words may be seen in our Hebrew Bible to-day with this mark above them, supposed by some to be the "tittle" referred to by our Lord, and probably indi- cating originally words that were omitted in some manuscripts. Their simple method of choosing between two vary- ing readings in different manuscripts would certainly not satisfy our revisers of the Jerusalem Chamber, with their perfect critical apj/aratus beside them. There is a Talmud note, for instance, on Deut. xixiii. 27 where the manuscripts disagreed as to a certain word. " Babbi Simeon-ben-Lakish said that three copies were found in the hall of the Temple. In one of them they found written ''TIS'O (Mboni), in two of them njl^D (Meohah), and they adopted, therefore, the text of the two against that of the one." It was certainly a very mechanical mode, and one that might easily have often set them wrong, for in 78 THE STORY OP THE MANUSCRIPTS. manuscripts, as in men, truth is by no means always witih the majority. But it was the best way they knew. And, all things considered, we may be thank- ful for their hard imd fast rule of deciding by majority instead of arbitrarily choosing, with their fanciful and unscientific minds, what might seem to them the best readings. Anyhow, the fact that they shrank from introducing any changes into the text, and merely kept them in the margin — for a long time, indeed, only in their memories — does much to secure the text even when they decided on the wrong word. But the great security of the text amongst the Talmudists is the extreme reverence and awe with which it was regarded. Human nature is a strange compound. The very men who practically were put- ting their commentary in the place of the Bible almost worshipped the letter of that Bible itself. They wrote every word in it with scrupulous care ; they washed their pens before the Holy Name; they dared not alter even a plain mistake except by a correction in the margin of the text. " My son," said Rabbi Ishmael, " take great heed how thou doest thy work, for thy work is the work of Heaven, lest thou drop or add a letter of the manuscript, and so become a destroyer of the world." Never were saintly relics reverenced as were these old manuscripts. Never was a book BO marvellously guarded. Nothing, surely, but the conviction that " to them were committed the oracles of God " could account for such a jealous care.* ' We have little coDception of the awe and reverence of the Jews THE TALMUD PERIOD. 79 IV. The Bible of the Academies. Now, what was the condition of this carefully- guarded Bible of the academiea in the early Christian centuries as compared with that of oar present Masso- retic manuscripts ? Though there are no Hebrew manuBcripts of this period remaining, yet by mesuis of Greek and other translations we can investigate the text up almost to the days of our Lord. There are three celebrated Greek versions — ^those of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, made before the year 200 A.D.^ The first two of these writers are said to have been students in the College of Tiberias, and therefore would be wit- nesses of the most approved Palestiue text. Now, a scholar can easily turn these translations back into their original Hebrew, and then they are found to agree, not exactly, but very closely, with the existing manuscripts — ^much more closely than the Septuagint version or the Pentateuch of the Samaritans. The Syriac (Peshitto) version of the second centniy is also clearly founded on Hebrew manuscripts like oure, to this day for tha words of th« holy tongue. Bren if it be not Scrip- ture, merely a leaf of the Hebrew Frayer-book which haa got torn or has fallen on the floor, it is tonched with a anperstitious awe, as an idolator would touch his idol. To be sure, with the lower classes it is more superstition than any real feeling of religion. The writer was told by an eye- witness the other day of a Jewish boy treading inad- vertently on smoh a page, and receiving from his horrified father a blow that almost felled him to the ground. ' For an account of these Versions see Book ii p. 153. 8o THE STORY OP THE MANUSCRIPTS. and the Targnms (i.e., paraphrases in the common vernacular of the Jews) seem to have precisely the same text underlying them. About A.D. 230 we have the testimciny of Origen, the best scholar of his age, who undertook to compare in parallel columns the Hebrew with the Septuagint, and the three other Greek versions just mentioned. His evidence is to the same effect, with this addition, that the Hebrew manuscripts of his day seem to have been almost uniform in text. He seems never to think of any variations, but to have before him a standard Hebrew text, with which he labours to bring the versions into agreement. As we come down towards the year 400, the exist- ence of the present Massoretic text is perfectly clear. St. Jerome, the only Hebrew scholar of his day in the Western Church, made his famous Vulgate version from manuscripts almost exactly the same as ours. He points out certain errors in the Septuagint which he says " do not agree with the Hebrew," and quotes the Hebrew exactly as it is now. He also, curiously enough, writes out certain Hebrew verses in ordinary Roman letters, showing us not only that he had it in the passages quoted word for word as we have, but also that he pronounced the words with the same vowels as ours, though there were no vowel points in existence in his time. Of course, they were Palestine mtuiuBcripts that he used. His teachers were all nribes from the Palestine schools. He tells us of one who used to come by night to him, like Nicodemus, THE TALMUD PERIOD. 8i " secretly for fear of the Jews ; " and in his preface to the Books of Chronicles he mentions a doctor from the College of Tiberias, in high esteem among the Hebrews, as his principal instructor and helper in the work.^ The " Palestine Text" We trace, then, back to the days of our Lord a Hebrew text almost exactly the same as that which has come down to as in the Massoretic manuscripts. We have seen, too, that, from the care bestowed on it before that time, we are justified in believing that, with some slight variations, it is the identical text of the " Great Synagogue " days, when many of the authors of the later books were alive. Though there is but little material for our history in the still earlier period, all the evidence goes to show the marvellously correct transmission of the Mosaic writings; and whatever variations existed in the manuscripts of the later books, we have every reason to believe were corrected as far as possible in the Great Synagogue days, when the separate books were collected into a " Bible." The reader will keep in mind that we are dealing with the text as used by the Palestine Jews. The * One of his teachers was the Rabbi Barrabanus, whose name, as a great stroke of wit, was shortened into Barrabas by one of Jerome's assailants. He is abusing Jerome for finding errors in the Septuagint, and triumphantly demands, "Which are most likely to be right, ♦he seventy translators guided by the Holy Ghost, or the one translator guided by Barrabas?" Humour was not a strong point with these old fathers. 82 THE STORY OP THE MANUSCRIPTS. Samaritan Pentateuch and the (Greek) Septnagint represent long-lost mannscripts, differing more or less from this. They form a very interesting study, and in some instances, as we shall see, suggest the true readings in cases where the received text is faulty. But we cannot depend on them. Our chief reason for believing in the superior accuracy of the existing Hebrew Scriptures is, that they contain the Palestine text, which has been for all these ages in the hands of scholarly priests and scribes, and guarded with the most scrupulous care. The manuscripts used for the Septuagint were in the hands of men who, as far as we can judge, had neither the same Hebrew scholar- ship, the same frightened awe about the letter of the text, nor the same strict notions of a copyist's work which obtained amongst the Palestine Jews. In Alexandria especially, the home of the Septuagint, the tendency was towards a much freer dealing with Scripture than the rigid formal literalism of the Jews of Palestine would allow. The sense, not the very words and letters, was the chief consideration, and they would probably not hesitate to slightly expand or alter the form of an expression, if thus they could express the sense more clearly. Now, it is evident that this tone of mind, healthy as it is in a student or expositor, is by no means con- ducive to an accurate preserving and transmitting of the text. The Palestine temper was the veiy opposite. Be it narrowness and superstition, be it worship of the letter while neglecting the spirit, be it foolish THE TALMUD PERIOD. 83 mysticism about the meaning of trifles, be it what it may, tha fear and reverence engendered for every jot and tittle of the sacred writings has been, in God's providence, a most marvellous safeguard in the correct transmission of the Old Testament in Palestine. OHAPTER Vm. THE STORY OP THE MANUSCRIPTS, THE DAYS or THK MASSORBTKS. Who were the MassoretesT After the completion of the Talmud in the fifth century the academies were freer than ever for the study of the sacred text. We have seen that in the previous periods a number of oral traditions had been gradually accumulating respecting the right method of reading the text, the accuracy of certain passages, &c. These had grown to a considerable body of notes at the close of the Talmud period, but were preserved only in a confused way in the traditions of various academies, and in the memories of various Babbis. But as the circumstances of their national life made it increasingly difficult to preserve these oral traditions, it now became desirable to collect them into some order and commit them to writing, and this was the beginning of the written Massobah, bo famous in the history of the Hebrew text. It will be remembered that for ages all these notes and corrections were THE DAYS OP THE MASSORETBS. 85 oral, handed down by tradition through the colleges of the Scribes from one generation to another. They were, therefore, always referred to as the Massokah, i.e., the tradition ; the men who collected and committed them to writing are called the Massorbtes, and the text which these scholars hare handed down to us certified as in their opinion correct is known as the Massoeetic text. In the hands of the Massoretic Scribes the original deposit was greatly enlarged and improved. They arranged into a complete commentary the remarks of their predecessors. They examined the manuscripts critically and completely, whereas the Talmudists had but made disconnected notes. They studied the languages, the grammar, the interpretation of the Scriptures. They invented the vowel points and accents to stereotype the correct reading. Thus slowly and gradually the Massorah * grew. It belongs not to any one age or any one set of scholars. It began probably with a few short technical notes to guard against copyists' blunders in places liable to error, and gradually grew during many ages into a commentary on the whole text, a great " critical apparatus" for the amending and preserving of the Old Testament Scriptures. Therefore, though we apply the term to the men of the period who completed and wrote the Massorah, the Massoretes, in truth, might be said to have existed ' The reader must keep clearly in mind that the Maagorah was not ftie text itself, but the mass of critioal and other notes oouoeruing the text. G 86 THE STORY OP THE l^ANUSCRIPTS. almost from the days of Ezra. " Indeed," says Elias Levita, " there were hundreds and thousands of Mas- Boretes, and they continued, generation after generation, for very many years." Dr. Ginsburg, the highest living authority, puts the beginning of the Massorah about three centuries before Christ, and it was not completed for 1 300 years. What we have here designated as the " days of the Masso- retes," t.«., the period when the Massorah was com- pleted and written out, may be roughly set down at &om 500 to 1000 A.D. Contents of the Massorah. A merely general notion of the contents of the Massorah is all that can be given here. It deals minutely with the books, sections, verses, words, letters, vowel points, accents, and such matters. It gives conjectures, or, where possible, definite correc- tions, of anything apparently wrong in the text. It indicates where anything was supposed to have been added or left out or altered, or whether certain words were written with or without the vowel letters (see p. 64). It puts particular marks on words about which there was anything in the least unusual. It records the " various readings." It counts up the verses, the words, even the letting of the separate books, and invents mnemonic signs by which to remember them g I THE DAYS OF THE MASSORBTES. 87 easily. It tells how often the same word occurs at the beginning, middle, or end of a verse. It gives the middle verse, the middle word, the middle letter, of each book of the Law, &c., Sue. But to continue a long enumeration of this kind will probably but confuse the reader. Cleamess is more important to aim at than completeness. There- fore it will be best rather to try by means of a few examples in simple form to leave in the reader's mind a distinct, even if a very partial, notion of what the Maasorah contains. m. Its Two Classes of Notes. At first the Massorah notes existed only in separate books and sheets, which were used in the public lectures of the Scribes. Afterwards, for convenience' sake, they were transferred to the margin of the Old Testament manuscripts. But this was very clumsily done. The remarks were not always placed on the same page with the verse to which they belonged. The writers had a fashion, too, of making them up into all sorts of fancy shapes, of men and fishes and flowers and birds, as shown in the opposite photograph. If there was too much matter for the figure, they did not hesitate to transfer the overplus to the end of the book ; if too little, they calmly inserted bits from other places to fill up the gap. Thus it became a 88 THE STORY OF THE MANUSCRIPTS. Herculean task to reduce the Massorah into anything like order. The notes, for the most part, might be brought under two separate heads referring to : — (i.) JVhat IS in the text. An elaborate system of rules and annotations intended to secure the exact transmission of the text before them in the smallest particulars, to preserve from corruption eveiy jot and tittle of the Scriptures. (2.) What SHOULD BE in the text. Corrections of mistakes and guesses about doubtful readings, which, however, they did not venture to meddle with in the text itself, but only recorded in the margin of the manuscripti IT. What is In the Text (i.) As the first illustration of the notes con- cerning WHAT IS IN THE TEXT, I take an extract from the " Massoreth - Hammassoreth " of Elias Levita, a mediasval writer on the Massorah, whom I have referred to already — " The Massoretes by their diligence have learned and marked that the 1 in ]inj (Lev. xi. 42) is the middle of all the letters of the Pentateuch ; that ' Moses diligently amu/ht' (Lev. x. 16) is the middle of all the words ; that ' the breastplate ' verse (Lev, viii. 8) is the middle of all the vemes. This they have done in THE DAYS OP THE MASSORETBS. 89 all the sacred books. Moreover, they have counted the verses, words, and letters of each section in the Pentatench, and made marks accordingly. Thus the section ' Bereshith ' (the first section in Genesis) has 146 verses, the sign is amaziah." He means that the Hebrew letters having regular numerical values like our Eoman numerals, the Hebrew letters amaziah, like the Eoman letters CXLVi., denote 146, and thus make a mnemonic for the number of the verses. (2.) " They hav6 also counted each separate letter in the Scriptures, and have noted that — "K (A) occurs 42,377 times, "2(B) „ 35,218 „ &c., &c. "Indeed," continues Levita, "a beautiful poem was written long ago on this subject, beginning 'The Tabernacle, the place of my buildings,' " &c. Well, it is an ingenious poem at any rate, and a useful poem for its purpose of enabling one to remember the number of the letters. As to its beauty, there is no accounting for tastes. I fear, though, its claim can only be based on the philosophical principle that " the useful is the truly beautiful," on which principle we have an exquisitely beautiful poem in English, begin- ning — " Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November," 4o. Here is the first stanza of this " beautiful poem " 90 THE STORY OF THE MANUSCRIPTS. on the letter s (A). I represent the Hebrew by English letters : — •'AoHBi Mbkon Bbntanai, SHiBHAU Halo Zekesnai." " The Tabemade is my court, Whither my elders do resort." "The whole congregation "For a »»orifioe of peaoe together was forty and tvo offering, two oxen, flyeraiuB, thousand tbreebTindred and five he go*ti, live Iambi" threescore " (Neh. Til. 65). (Numb, vii 17). Now for the explanation of this "poem." In the above Hebrew words the " A." marks the letter dis- cussed, the other initial letters, M., B., SH., H., Z., represent numbers whose total value is 42,377, the number of A's in the Old Testament. To make assur- ance doubly sure, the two verses underneath are added as a further mnemonic: the number of the congre- gation in one verse (42,360), and the number of animalfi in the other ( 1 7), when added together, make the same number, 42,377. Thus every letter in the alphabet is laboriously gone through, with the pious object of preventing the insertion or omission of a single letter in the deposit committed to them by God. I dare say these precautions were not always effectual. It would require a high faith in human nature to believe that every scribe took the trouble of counting and checking the separate letters in his manuscript. Yet it must have been in some degree a security against errors, and in any case it shows the THE DAYS OP THE MASSORETES. 91 care with which the appointed record-keepers of God gaarded their sacred charge, \ (3.) Again, they wonld put asterisks, or rather little circles, over certain words in a verse, calling attention to a footnote. If the word occurs only in that place the note says, " None other ; " if more than once, it announces, "three, four, six, Ac, timeB," giving the places where it occurs, something after the style of Cruden's Concordance, only that the old Mas- soretes had not the convenience of numbered chapters and verses. These were usually words about which a copyist might easily err ; for example, under the phrase " The Spirit of God " (Elohim) the note says " It occurs 8 times," and indicates the places. In all other cases but these eight it is " The Spirit of The Lord " (Jehovah), and the note keeps the copyist from dropping into this easy mistake of writing the more common phrase. They write also such notes as these : — " There are two verses in the Torah (Law) beginning with M : eleven verses in which the first and last letter is N : there are forty verses in which Lo is read three times," &c. They explain that such a verb is connected with such a noun, such a word should be so construed, and so on. (4.) Here is a curious illustration of another class of notes. I give it to show the marvellous carefulness of these men, and how they considered no detail too minute or insignificant to be attended to in their sacred guardianship of the Word of God. 92 THE STORY OF THE MANUSCRIPTS. In Joshaa ix. i we read : " When all the kings that were on this side Jordan, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite, heard thereof." Here are six kings mentioned, and the conjunction " and " occurs only twice, before the second and before the sixth. What possible safe- guard can there be to preserve that insignificant little word in its proper position ? Would not a copyist, if not especially on his guard, almost inevitably get it into the wrong places ? See how the Massoretes guard against this danger. Underneath this verse about the kings they put, in a footnote, a little catch-word, " The gold for THE KINGS, " and refer ns to a certain section in the Book of Numbers. There we find the word Gold in Numb. xxxi. 22, which reads as follows: " Only the Gold and the silver, the brass, the iron, the tin, and the lead." Here again we have six nouns, and we find that the conjunction " and " is before the second and sixth. Thus we learn that these are the right positions for the conjunction in the verse from which we have been referred. These two verses are thus a check on each other — a check which, though it seem slight to the English reader, was effective enough for the Hebrew Scribes, with their intimate knowledge of and scrupulous care for every letter of the text. But whatever be the reader's estimate of its value, in any case it illustrates the laborious and accurate care- fulness of the Massoretes. THE DAYS OP THE MASSORBTES. 93 V. What should be in the text. The above are examples of their care to preserve nncomipt what is in the text. But sometimes they had reason to believe that the mannscripts before them had become corrupted already in some places, and this necessitated another set of marginal com- ments to indicate in their opinion what should be in the text, for their reverence for the sacred letters (i.e., the consonants) of the text itself was carried so far that they would not dare to meddle with them, even to correct an obvious mistake. The reader must learn the two Hebrew words continually used in this class of notes : — np = Keri = what must be read. 2''n2 = Kethibh = what is written. (l.) Suppose, now, the Massoretes, in making a new copy, found in the manuscript before them a word which they had reason to believe was incorrect. Their superstitions reverence for the text would not allow them to correct it boldly. Vbat then did they do ? They wrote down in their new copy the consonant t of this incorrect word just as they found them. [Rien they wrote in the margin the consonants of what they believed to be the correct word, and put its vowels under the consonants of the wrong word which they had just transcribed, with an asterisk calling attention to the margin. This incorrect word in the text then with these vowels could not be read without making 94 THE STORY OF THE MANUSCRIPTS. nonsenfle, so the reader had to turn to the consonants of the right word in the margin. It was as if we should print in our English Bible : — Bless the Lord, my soul, and ^ „ , ' * Read B w » i ■, forget not all His c,MMp{DMjiiTS.* i.e., " benefits " is the word that should be read instead of " commandments." The right word in the margin was called the " Keri " (what should be read). The wrong word in the text wm the " Kethibh " (that which is written). There is a good example in Ps. xvi. 10, where the text has "Thy holy ones," while the " Keri " correctly gives the singular in the margin, " Suffer Thine Holy One to see corruption." The most frequent example of a " Keri " is the unutterable name Jhvh, which, owing to the " Keri," we have learned to mispronounce as Jehovah. No one can tell now with any certainty what are its true vowels ; probably it should be read as Tahveh. With such awe was the word regarded that it was fcs-bidden to be uttered by any except the high priest, and by him only once a year in the Holy of Holies.* On all other occasions the word I One old legend tells that whenever the high priest pronounced the name it was heard as far as to Jericho, but all the hearers immediately forgot It. Later stories attribute the miracles of Jesua to His utter- ance of the Sacred Name, the true pronunciation of which He bad learned in some mysterious way. But the most curious thing about this old superstition is the way in which its results remain to us still. In consequence of it the Septuagint version always used the word LoBD for Jhth, and through the Septuagint the habit has crept not only into the works of the New Testament writers, who all used the Septuagint, but even into our English Old Testament of to-day, often very much spoiling the force and meaning in passages where Jehovab is contrasted with other gods. THB DAYS OP THB MASSORBTES. 95 Adonai (Lord) was usually directed to be read instead, and to indicate this the vowels of A,d,k,i were put under the letters of the " most holy word," thus J^o^.H. (2.) One class of the marginal " Keris " was, I should think, rather a danger than a protection to the text, though, at the same time, one could wish that some of them were retained to-day in our English Bibles for reading the Old Testament Lessons in church. They are called euphemistic " Keris." Where a coarse, inde- corous expression occurs in the text, the Scribes, while not daring to meddle with the expression itself, put in the margin words that were more fitted for reading in public, and the " Keri" directed that the reader should use them instead of the others. 3. Sometimes a word or phrase is in the text that should be omitted — a usual case is where the copyist has carelessly repeated a word. The reader will pro- bably find examples often in his own letter-writing of such redundancy ; it is a very common slip of writers. In such a case we should just score out the word. The Massoretes dared not do this, so they left its con- sonants in the text, but called attention to the error by leaving it without vowels, and writing in the mar- gin, " KetMbh, not Keri," i.e., " Written, but not to be read;"' as, for example, Jer. li. 3 : "Against the bender let the archer bend his bow," where the word 1 The Massorah gives eight instances : Ruth iiL 12 ; 2 Sam. xiii. 33, XV. 21 ; 3 Kings t, 18 ; Jer, xxzviii. 16, xxxix. 12, li. 3 ; Ezek. xlviiL 16. 96 THE STORY OP THE MANUSCRIPTS. " bender" has been repeated by a slip of some early copyist, or, for aught we know, of the original writer himself. This is how it appears in the Massoretic numuscriptB : — AO^NST TH, B,ND^ TH BimK * • Kethibh, not Keri L,T TH, ABCH,B B.ND Hj8 B^W (written ; not to be read), 4. The converse of this case occurs very frequently. The context clearly shows that one or more words have been omitted. The Massoretes, of course, would not supply the words, but leave a blank wherein they insert the vowels required by the missing word or words, and put the consonants of them in the margin with a note, "Keri, not Kethibh," i.e., "Should be read, though not written."^ Take, as an example, 2 Sam, viii. 3 : — Hg WgNT To B,C„V,R HjS B,RD,R • phrts, Keri, not Kethibh AT THe RiVgK eu • • • a • • • * ^*^^ ^^^' *'^°^S^ °°* written). i.e., in the opinion of the Massoretes, the word ,„phr,ts (Euphrates) should be read after " river," It may be well to remark here that these notes, while showing the extreme care of the Massoretes, must not always be regarded as infallible. We have to use our judgment and the ancient versions in deciding. Our English Authorised Version follows sometimes the "Keri" (marginal correction), sometimes the "Kethibh" (what is written in text). The Revised Version seems usually to prefer keeping the " Kethibh " in the text 1 The Massorah gives ten instances, some of which are questioned in the Revised Version : Judges x. 13 ; Ruth iii. 5, 17 ; 2 Sam. viii 3, svi. 22. zviii. 20 ; 2 Kings ziz. 31, 37 ; Jer. zxxi. 38, L 29. THE DAYS OP THE MASSORBTES. 97 and leaving the " Keri " in the margin, with the note, " Another reading is," ^ &c. This is one of the great advantages of the Massoretio reverence for the letter of- the text. We not only get their opinion in the margin as to the right reading, but we have preserved for ns also in the text the old reading, which they rightly or wrongly regarded as iacorrect. If they, with their defective knowledge of textual criticism, had ventured to correct the text as they thought best, they would probably have done as much harm as good, and the old, and in many cases true, readings would havp been entirely lost. VI. The Vowels and Accents. The invention of the vowel-points is another very important port of the work of the Massoretes. This subject has been already dealt with in an earlier chapter. It is scarcely necessary to add anything further here, except, perhaps, to emphasise the fact that the Massoretio vowel-system did not introduce any change in the old traditional reading, but only fixed and stereotyped it. The Massoretes found certain Towel-Bounds supplied in the readiag of the consonant text. They merely invented signs to represent these sounds, so that there should be no possibility after- wards of any variation in the reading. These vowel- ' Thsre are oaieg, howaTer, such as Pi. 0. 3 ; lea. ix; 3, where the revisers have made a great improvement by lubitituting the " Keri " of the Hauoretai for the " Kethibb," which haa been retained in th* Authoriied Veraioa (lea apwamen, p. 202), 98 THE STORY OP THE MANUSCRIPTS. signs they regarded as a mere human nnconsecrated thing, qnite external to the holy text itself, and only used for convenience' sake.^ They never admitted them into the sacred rolls of the Syn^^gne. It is, therefore, scarcely necessary tq add that we are not bound to accept the Massoretic vowels as in- fallible. They represent the highest tradition as to the correct reading. They are generally the only pos- sible reading. But we must remember that the original authors of the Bible wrote only the consonants. There- fore, if in any particular place we are able to make sense by reading the vowels differently, it is quite possible that our reading may be right. See, for ex- ample, " Jacob's bed " and " Jacob's staff" in page 1 2. We owe to them also the Hebrew accents, those curious marks that may be noticed in our specimen (p. i), dotted about over the text. I despair of arousing my readers* enthusiasm about these accents, mere grammar marks, as they have grown to be to the English reader of Hebr&w now, or, at most, signs for recording the true chanting tones of the Synagogue. Only the living voice — only, I think, the Jewish voice can convey any idea of this beautiful contrivance for recording the modulations and inflections of the speaker's tones. They almost placed upon the paper the spoken words. They marked the sense and logical connection. They represented pause, emphasis, emo- ' Tha itory in Ohapter IL of the oontroversy about the Towel-pointa in Kafomution times refen, of coune, to a half-eduoated body of Jewi six hundred years after this period. THE DAYS OP THE MASSORETES. 99 tion, whisper, tremulousness— "everything that we im- perfectly try to denote by italics, and capitals, and dashes, and pnnctnation marks. Get a refined, educated Jew, an enthusiastic man, capable of flashing eyes and trembling excitement over his subject ; let him read for yon a touching passage in the Prophets according to these accents by which the Massoretes tried to re- produce the original utterance, and you will — well at least you will probably be very much dissatisfied with the reading of the First Lesson in church the next Sunday. vn. Manuscript Copying. Their rules for copying Synagogue manuscripts wiU help to emphasise what has been said as to the pre- cautions against transcribers' errors. They must be transcribed from an ancient and approved manuscript solely with pure black ink made of soot, charcoal, and honey, upon the skin of a "clean" animal prepared expressly for the purpose by a Jew. The sheets or skins are to be fastened together with strings made from the sinews of a clean animal. The scribe must not write a single word from memory; he must attentively look upon each individual word in his exemplar, and orally pronounce it before writing it down. In writing any of the sacred names of God, he must solemnise his mind by devotion and reverence; before writing any of them he must wash his pen ; before writing the IneiTable loo THE STORY OF THE MANUSCRIPTS. Name (Jhvh) he must wash his whole body. The copy must be examined within thirteen days. Some writers assert that the mistake of a single letter vitiates the entire codex ; others assert that it is per- mitted to correct three in any one sheet ; if more are found the copy is to be condemned as profane. Probably many of the Synagogue rolls in Gentile libraries to-day are only these discarded copies.^ vni. The Last of the Massoretes. Foremost in the great work of the Massorah was the College of Tiberias, and away on the Euphrates the Babylon schools, now rivalling their ancient mother in repute. The two sets of scholars worked indepen- dently of each other, and did not always entirely agree in their result. The points of difference, how- ever, are of very minor importance, and the Western or Palestine school ultimately prevailed, though not to the entire exclusion of the other. I wish, reader, it were allowed me, in closing this chapter, to write for you the story of " The Last of the Massoretes;" to tell of the Massorah completed ; of the academies broken up and rude Arab tribes holding revel in the halls ; of outcast Jewish scholars wander- ing through the land to seek precarious shelter in Germany and Spain. About the year when William the Conqueror was born Aaron ben-Asher was Prin- > See Scott Porter, Text Crit., p. 72, note. THE DAYS OP THE MASSORETBS. loi cipal of the College of Tiberias, and Jacob ben- Naphthali of the Babylon schools, and no man was enrolled after them in the number of the Massorah Scribes. Two famous Rabbis were they, worthy to close the long illustrious list of the scholarly " men of the Massorah." Each of them exerted his powers to the utmost that his academy should produce an immaculate copy of the Scriptures, and in such reputa- tion were their manuscripts held that they became the standards for the Massoretic text. But history affords no materials for the story. No historian of their day recognised their importance. No chronicler was touched by the romantic nobleness of the task,- to picture the last days of the rival academies and the end of the great work thirteen centuries long. Silent and signless the Massoretes disappeared. Let us not forget what we owe to their labours. Let us not be unmindful of His good hand upon us who sent them to preserve for us the " Oracles of God." IX. A Mysterious Document Now that we have gone through the " Stoiy of the Manuscripts," we cannot help feeling that an important question still remains unsolved. What was the docu- ment from which the Massoretic manuscripts were copied ? No one can look over a number of these manuscripts, or even examine the printed text of an ordinary Hebrew Bible, noticing how every peculiarly I02 THB STORY OP THE MANUSCRIPTS. Bhaped letter, every correction, nay, even every little irregularity and error, is exactly reproduced in all of them alike, without feeling convinced that there miist have been some one document with these peculiarities which was made the archetype or standard of the Afas- soretic text. Where did this mysterious document come from ? Was it a manuscript made by the men of the Great Synagogue as the result of revision? Wag it one of the " Temple copies " referred to in p. 8 1 ? Was it a " Codex of Ezra," such as tradi- tion tells of, or a standard selected in conclave by the Scribes ? Or had it another and more tragic story — some dread crisis in the history of the nation — in the struggle with Antiochus— in the massacre at Bethur ? Is there a lost picture somewhere in the ancient story — the hunted patriots hiding in the mountains ; the soiled and torn fragments of the Hebrew manuscripts gathered together from their places of concealment, of some of the books only two or three, of some per- haps but a single copy, stained with blood, shrivelled by fire, all that remains to them of their sacred records ? What wonder if it were so in those awful days when the Bible so nearly perished altogether ! What won- der if from these few manuscripts came the " Standard Bible," the ancestor of this mysteriously uniform text ? These are all but guesses, reader. We can only guess. The dim past holds its secret still as to the origin of this " Standard Bible." CHAPTER IX. NOTES AND JOTTINGS. After the dispersion of the Jewish academies many Hebrew scholars fled to Europe, especially to Spain, where the critical study of the Bible and tradition was still carried on The result of their work, however, is not to us of much importance, since the text was long before this time completely fixed. Their writings are chiefly of value on account of the manuscripts which they had before them, many of which have since been lost to the world. Amongst the famous names of this period often met with in Commentaries on the Bible are those of Aben-Ezra, Rashi, David Kimchi, and the great Maimonides, the Jewish Luther, of whom it is written, " From Moses of Sinai to Moses Maimonides, no man like him lived." The first printed portion of the Hebrew Scripture was the Book of Psf^ms, published a.d. 1477. I04 NOTES AND yOTTINGS. Tlie most important of all the earlier Hebrew Biblea was issued in the sixteenth century by Daniel Bom- berg of Venice, whose editor-in-chief was a very famous scholar, the Babbi Jacob - ben - Chajim, an African Jew. It is most refreshing to watch this old Hebrew's enthusiasm over his work, and to note, even in so dry a document as an " Introduction to the Eab- binical Bible," the little touches revealing his character and his moral fitness for so important a task. He is greatly delighted with his employer's zeal. " Seignior Daniel Bomberg," he writes, " did all in his power to Bend into all countries in order to search what may be found of the Massorah. He was not backward, nor did he draw back his right hand from producing gold out of his purse to defray the expenses of books and messengers. . . . Like a bear bereft of her young ones, he hastened to this work, for he loved the daughter of Jacob." A beautiful trait in his character is his simple modesty so indicative of a superior mind. When Bomberg proposed to him this great work, " I told him," he says, "that I did not know as much as he thought, in accordance with what we read at the end of chap. ii. of the Jerusalem Maccoth, ' A man who knows only one book when he is in a place where he is respected for knowing two is in duty bound to say, ' I know only one book.' " JS is rather amusing to compare the modesty of ben Chajim with that of another great contemporary worker at the Massorah notes, Elias Levita, whose NOTES AND JOTTINGS. 105 name has already occurred in the preceding pages. " I have seen," he says, " that it is not good for this my book to be alone. I will therefore make it an helpmeet for it." And so he writes a poetical intro- duction in which he tells how people could not under- stand the Massoretic notes : — " Till the day it was said to me by my estimable friendci, ' What doest thou here, Eliaa ! Throw light upon the Mamorah. For the glory of God and Holy Writ explain to us the Massorah.' When the Prince heard me, then he kissed me with the kisses of his mouth, Saying, ' Art thou that my lord Elias whose books are over all countries t ' " After Bomberg's Bible comes a long series of edi- tions reaching down to the- present century. Much time and money and labour were expended in collect- ing and comparing Hebrew manuscripts for the pre- paration of the Bibles, but the result was very dis- appointing. No discoveries of any importance were made ; nothing earlier than the Massoretic manuscripts could anywhere be found, and these were almost word for word the same. Would you care to be shown, reader, an ancient picture of the making of the " Standard Hebrew Bible," ^ whose origin is enveloped in mystery, whose manuscripts have been copied with such scrupulom care that even its little flaws have come down tc ' S«e Ohap. "IXi p. loi. io6 NOTES AND JOTTINGS. ns nntonchedP The picture rises irresistibly heton me from a page of my English Bible. There is the old copyist seated at his desk patiently transcribing letter by letter the wearisome list of names in I Chron. viii., ix. — name after name — name after name — in monotonous succession. At last he stops and lays down his pen. He has just written the words, "These dwelt at Jerusalem." This will do nicely for a catch-word to find his place again when he returns, and so repeating the words to him- self the old man retires to rest. I see him next day resuming his task. He arranges his parchments, he looks at the catch-word, the last he has written, and raising his eyes to the manuscript before him, they light on the words, hut at the top of the preceding page, "These dwelt at Jekusalem," and calmly he goes on &om that, in blissful uncon- sciousness that he is writing over again his yesterday's work. You can find that little picture for yourself, my reader, if you open your English Bible at I Chron. ix. 34. This is the verse where the old scribe stopped at " These dwelt at Jerusalem ; " and if you look up to the 28th verse of the preceding chapter, you will find the same words in the line that caught his eye when he returned, and you will see he has written over again after be. 34 a good deal of the passage that follows viii. 28. Compared with the vast amount of labour expended SOTBS AND yOTTINOS. loj on the textual criticism of the New Testament, very little indeed has been done for the Old. Unfortunately, when the question of the perfect accuracy of the Old Testament text was first started in the Reformation days, it became at once, like that of the vowel-points, a party contest instead of an unbiassed search for the truth. The good fathers of the Council of Trent, in- nocent of any knowledge of Hebrew themselves, and desirous to laud up the authority of the (Latin) Vul- gate, the Authorised Version of the Western Church of that day, threw doubts upon the correct transmission of the Hebrew manuscripts in the hands of the " unbe- lieving Jews." This, of course, was quite enough to rouse the Protestants to the defence of it, so that the accuracy of the Hebrew Old Testament soon became with them almost an article of faith, and, like many of the party shibboleths of to-day, was most violently in- sisted on by those who were least capable of forming a judgment about it, and so the odium tJuolcgievm,, as so often before and since, muzzled the honest seek- ing for the truth, and the unbiassed scholarly study of the subject was thrown back for centuries. Though much has been already done, we have still great need of a good critical edition of the Old Testa- ment, embodying the chief results of modern scholar- ship. There is, of oounie, in the absence of all manu- scripts of earlier than Massoretic times, a great drawback io8 NOTES AND JOTTINGS. to the critical study of tlie Old Testament, as com- pared w ith the New. But much more might he done with the material at hand, especially with the ancient versions, which, if thoroughly investigated, are cap- able of throwing much light upon the Hebrew text- However, our own generation has been doing well in this direction. We have now Dr. Ginsburg's critical edition of the Massoretic text. We have Dr. Swete's great edition of the Septuagint and Wordsworth's Vulgate of the New Testament which has not yet been matched by a similar work for the Old Testa- ment, but great things are expected of the forthcom- ing Vulgate edited by scholars of the Vatican. Clearly much work is stiU needed on the Old Testament. The English Revised Old Testament was undertaken half a century too soon. As to the right attitude to adopt with regard to the present Hebrew text, we may say that the best scholars receive it without hesitation as substantially accurate, at the same time leaving themselves open to accept any really well-authenticated corrections by means of the ancient versions. In speaking thus plainly about the probability of errors in the Scriptures, there is great danger that an exaggerated impression should be caused as to the NOTES AND JOTTINGS. 109 extent of these errors. The reader should be reminded that the great majority are of the most trivial kind, misspelling or transposing of words, omitting or in- serting of insignificant particles, and such like. The New Testament variations are enormously more in number than those which probably will ever be dis- covered in the Old, and yet two of our greatest textual critics have asserted in a recent famous book ^ that the New Testament variations of any importance, if all put together, would not exceed the one-thousandth part of the whole text. • •••*• Some readers will perhaps be disturbed at finding that the Old Testament has not been transmitted to us absolutely word for word correct. Well, such is the ease anyhow ; and whether we like it or no, there is no use in quarrelling with facts. We know with certainty that we have the suistance of God's revelation exactly as the original writers had it ; that we cannot say the same of every letter and syllable is surely not of so very much account. And perhaps it may not be altogether an unmixed evil either. It may help men to broader and truer notions of what inspiration really means. It may teach that not the ignorant worship of the letter, but the honest learning and obeying of the spirit of His revelation is what God values, since He has left the words of the Bible in some degree to run the same risks as the words of other books, while taking care that its substance should come down to us ' Westcott and Hort'i lutroduction to the Greek New Testament ^jjj NOTES AND JOTTINGS. as originally given. It is surely inatmotive to see our Lord and His apostles content to nse a Bible (the Septuagint) which, while giving faithfully the sub- stance of God's Word, was often very inaccurate in minor detaila We have a much more accurate Bible than they. But whatever onr feeling about the matter, we should remember that we have it a$ Chd has thought fit to let us have it. Had it been necessary to His pur- poses that the text should have been miraculously preserved from the slightest flaw, wo need have no doubt but that this would have been accomplished Boom Si. THE OTHER OLD DOCUMENTS, Aim THBiB rsi iir TEXTUAL GBITICISM. BOOK II. INTEODUOTION. Having now learned something of the history and present condition of the " Old Hebrew Documents," we have next to examine some of the " Other Old Documents," i.e., the various ancient Bibles which are used by critics in the investigation of the Hebrew text. The reader will easily understand from the previous history the importance of these Bibles. All the old Hebrew manuscripts before a.d. 900 have vanished from the earth; unless in the very improbable event of- some future romantic discovery in tombs or buried cities, we shall never be able to examine one of them. But these ancient Bibles were translated from those old vanished manuscripts ages and ages ago. Therefore the interrogating of them is like going back a thousand years behind our existing manuscripts and asking the men of our Lord's day, and even of long before, " How did that vanished old Hebrew Bible of yours read this or that disputed passage ? " Unfortunately, the value of their evidence also is lessened, as might be expected, by the same slips and errors of copyists whose existence in the Hebrew Bible has sent us to seek their aid. In the follpwing pages we shall deal with the more important of these ancient Bibles. DOCUMENT No. T. THE PENTATEUCH OF THE SAMARITANS. I. The Holy Manuscript of Nablous. It had often been noticed with some curiosity, especially at the Reformation times, in the disputes about the Hebrew Bible, that in the works of certain old fathers, Origen, and St. Jerome, and Eusebius the historian, and others, there were references to " t?it ancient Hebrew according to the Samaritans," as dis- tinguished from the " Hebrew according to the Jews," and notes made of certain discrepancies existing be- tween them. What could these references mean? No one in Europe knew anything about a " Samaritan Hebrew." Was it merely an error of these ancient fathers, or did there somewhere exist a Hebrew Bible differing from that which had come down to us through the Jews ? As time went on and nothing was discovered about it, it gradually began to be forgotten or relegated to the region of ancient fiction ; until one day, early in the seventeenth century, when Biblical students were startled by the announcement that a copy of thia THE PENTATEUCH OP THE SAMARITANS. 115 mysterious document had arrived in Europe, having been discovered by a traveller among the Samaritans of Damascus. It was a very venerable-looking manuscript, written in the unfamiliar ancient Hebrew letters, and for that reason at first very difiScult to read. Soon afterwards another copy was found in Egypt, but was captured by pirates, with the ship that was bringing it to Europe. Before 1630 Archbishop Ussher had obtained six others, and now there are altogether about sixteen Samaritan manuscripts in the European libraries. The most famous copy in existence is the Syn, -gogue Roll at Nablous, where the Samaritans, now but a few hundred in number, still cling to the ancient seat of their race.^ It is guarded with the most sacred care, and never exhibited even to their own people, except on the Great Day of Atonement. A few Europeans have, however, managed to get a sight of it, and from their accounts we learn that the writing, which seems very old, is on the hair-side of skins twenty-five inches by fifteen — according to the Samaritan account, the skins of rams offered in sacrifice. The manuscript is worn very thin, even into holes in many places, and it is a good deal messed, as if with ink spilled over it, so that a large part is almost illegible. It is kept in a cylindrical silver case, ornamented with engravings of the Tabernacle and its furniture, and the whole is ' NkUoiu, a oormption of Neapolia, ii ftlmcwt on the lite of uioient Bheehem, Il6 THE PENTATEUCH OF THE SAMARJTANS. wrapped in a gorgeously embroidered cover of red satin and gold. The Samaritans assert that it is nearly as old as the days of Moses. They say — and one Russian traveller asserts that they are right — that an inscription runs through the middle of the text of the Ten Commandments : — I Abishua, son or Phinehas, son or Elxazab son or Aabon thk priest^ cpon them be the gbaok OF Jehovah ! To His honoub have I written THIS holt Law at the entrance of the Tabeenaols op Testimony on Mount Gerizim, Beth El, in THE thirteenth TEAR OF THE TAKINO POBSESSIOK OF THE LAND OF CaNAAN. FbAIBE JeHOVAH ! The ir.8cription, however, has been looked for since, but in vain. Without entering too minutely into the question, all that we need say here is, that if it is or ever was in the manuscript, it does not deserve the slightest credit. Nobody who knows anything of the subject would believe that this manuscript has been in existence three thousand years. n. "Decline and Fall" of the Samaritan Bible. Of course, these very ancient-looking manuscripts, when they first appeared; created a considerable sen- sation. Men talked of their use among scholars of Origen's days, of their strange ancient writing dating back beyond Ezra the Scribe, and with the usual tfendency of human nature under such circumstances, many jumped at once to the conclusion that they had THE SAMARITAN ROLL AT NABLOUS. {By kind permission of the Palestine Exploration F^iMd.) To face page iifi.l THE PENTATEUCH OF THE SAMARITANS. 117 got back to a document of vast antiquity, and that the received Hebrew text was of little account beside it. Of course, too, like the other Biblical disputes referred to already, indeed like most theological dis- putes of those days when party spirit ran so high, the question as to their value soon became a contest for victory of party. The Romanist theologians made it almost a point of honour to uphold the Samaritan Scriptures. In the first place, they had always a strong prejudice against the Hebrew Bible. Not one of the good fathers of the Council of Trent knew a word of Hebrew, and they did not like its being set up as an authority against their Latin Vulgate Bible, the " Authorised Version " of the Western Church. Besides, it scored a point for them against Protestants if they could show that there was any uncertainty as to the text of the received Bible on which Protestants professed to take their stand — it proved the need of an infallible guide, which of course existed only in the Church of Rome. The Protestants were not slow in following the controversial lead thus set them, and so, instead of critically examining the Samaritan credentials with patient scholarly care, both parties contented themselves with fighting for victory and vigorously abusing their opponents. This is no place for a critical treatment of the question. Suffice it to say, that when the din of controversy had ceased sufficiently for calmer argu- ments to be heard, the opinion of scholars gradually grew against the authority of the Samaritan text, n8 THE PENTATEUCH OP THE SAMARITANS. (hongh still they were willing to allow a good deal of weight to its variations from the Hebrew. At length, early in the present century, even the remnant of authority remaining to it was quite swept away. A great Hebrew scholar, Gesenius, having analysed and classified its deviations from the Jewish manu- scripts, showed in a masterly essay that they were nearly all owing to — (i) grammatical blunders of the Samaritan Scribes; or (2) to a disposition to smooth and explain readings that seemed to them difficult and obscure ; or (3) to a wilful corruption of the text for controversial purposes, as, for example, where they substitute for the name of Ebal that of Mount Gerizim, on which their schismatical Temple stood, to show that this was the spot indicated by God as the future national place of worship. We may add that, so unanswerable are the arguments in this treatise, no one now would think of setting up the Samaritan Pentateuch as an authority in Biblical criticism. ni. Its Use in Criticism. Yet is it of some value in criticising our Hebrew Bible. With all its faults, it has at least this in its favour as an independent witness, that its text has been kept for nearly twenty-five centuries free from any contact with the received Jewish text. Therefore, its substantial agreement through its whole extent with the Massoretic manuscripts is a clear proof of their general accuracy. On the other hand, if, in THE PENTATEUCH OP THE SAMARITANS. 119 some minor detail, the Syriac and Vulgate and other important ancient Bibles to be described hereafter agree with each other against a reading in the Jewish Bible, it is evident that their case would be con- siderably strengthened if we found the Samaritan on their side, as in the examples already given (p. 48), " Cain said unto Abel, Let us go into ihe field " (Gen. iv. 8), or Joseph " made bondmen " of the people of Egypt (Gen. xlvii. 21). Here the Septua- gint and Syriac and Vulgate agree against the Hebrew ; and when we turn to the Samaritan we find it agree- ing with them, thus making a strong case against the accuracy of the received text in these places. There is a well-known variation in Exod. xii. 40, where the Hebrew text tells that " the sojourning of the children of Israel who dwelt in Egypt was 430 years." If the writer meant that their sojourning in Egypt was 430 years, it seems difficult to reconcile it with the chronology or with St. Paul's statement in Gal. iii. 17, where 430 years is given as the whole interval between Abraham and the Lawgiving on Mount Sinai The Samaritan has, " The sojourning of the children of Israel and of their fathers in the land of Canaan and in the land of Egypt was 430 years." ^ It may be that the Samaritan is right, but from what we know of its general character, it is not at all improbable that this is a correction to remove what seemed to its editors a chronological difficulty. ' Aad the Septuagint baa substantially the same. Yet there are foraible argnmenta on the other side, and Egyptologists say that the Egyptian chronolagy seems to oonfinn our received reading. 120 THE PENTATEUCH OF THE SAMARITANS. The reading seems a very tempting one, but most Biblical critics refuse to accept it. It is a good illustration of the rule in p. 24, that in many cases " the more difficult of two readings must be preferred to the easier." A Roundabout Story-teller. The reader must not think that because the Sama- ritan is of little authority in its variations from the Jewish Pentateuch, it is therefore a very corrupt and valueless book. Nothing of the kind. If we had not the Jewish text we should not be at all badly off with the " Five Books of Moses, according to the Samaritans." The variations for the most part consist of unimportant mistakes of grammar, and of expansions and para- phrases which very little affect the meaning. One curious peculiarity is, that when there is recorded some long command of God to Moses, whereas the Jewish text would briefly tell that Moses did as he was commanded, the Samaritan must needs go over the whole command, word for word, in recording that Moses had done it. It may interest the reader to have a specimen from this famous old document. I select the following passage because it illustrates, amongst other things, the peculiarity I have just referred to. It will be noticed that it agrees substantially with the Hebrew, its only variation being that it repeats almost word for word the second paragraph in recording how literally Moses and Aaron did as they were commanded: — HEBREW. And thk Lord said cnto Moses, Fbabaoh's heabt ib hab- denbd, bk berubeth to let the PEOPLE GO. Get thee unto Pha- raoh IN the mobnino ; lo, hs OOETH unto the WATEB ; AND THOO SHALT STAND BT THE BITEH'S BKINK AGAINST HE COMB ; AND THE ROD WHICH WAS TDRNED TO A SER- PENT SHALT THOO TAKE IN THINE HAND. AND THOU SHALT SAT UNTO HIM, The Lord God op the Hebrews hath sent me unto THEE, BATING, LkT MT PEOPLE BO, THAT THET MAT SERVE ME IN THE wilderness : AND, BEHOLD, HITHERTO THOU WOULDEST NOT HEAR. Thus saith the liORD, In this THOU SHALT KNOW THAT I AM THE Lord : behold, I will SMITE WITH THE BOD THAT IS IN MINE HAND UPON THE WATEB8 WHICH ARE IN THE RIVER, AND THKT SHALL BE TURNED INTO BLOOD. And the fish that is in THE RIVER SHALL DIE, AND THE BtVER SHALL STINK ; AND THE EgTPTIANS SHALL LOATHE TO DRINK OF THK WATEB OF THE BIVEB. And the Lord spakb unto MosBS, Sat unto Aabon, Take THY BOD, AND 8TEETCH OUT THINK HAND UPON THE WATEB8 OF EqTPT, to.— ExOD. vii. 14-19. SAMARITAN. And THE Lobd said cnto Moses, Pharaoh's heabt is hab- dened, he befubetb to let thk PEOPLE go. Get thee unto Pha- raoh IN the morning ; LO, HK OOETH UNTO THE WATER ; AND THOU SHALT STAND BT THE RIVER'b brink against he COMB ; AND THK ROD WHICH WAS TURNED TO A SER- PENT BHALT THOU TAKE IN THINE HAND. And thou bhalt bat unto HIM, The Lobd God of the Hebrews hath bent mb unto thee, SATING, Let mt people GO, THAT THET MAT SERVE ME IN THE WILDERNESS : AND, BEHOLD, HITHERTO THOU WOULDEST NOT HEAR. Thus saith the Lord, In this thou shalt know that I am the Lord : behold, I will smite with the rod that is in mine hand upon the watkrb which ABE in the RIVER, AND THET shall be TURNED INTO BLOOD. And the fish that is in the biveb shall die, and thb kiver shall stink ; and the EgTPTIANS shall LOATHE to drink of thk water of thb river. And Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh, and said onto him, The Lord God of the Hebrews hath sent us to thkb, bating, Let mt people go, that thbt mat serve me in thb wildeb- nebs : and, behold, hithebto THOU WOULDEST NOT BEAR. ThUS BAITH THE LORD, In THIS THOO SHALT KNOW THAT I AM THE LoRD : BEHOLD, I WILL SMITE WWH- THB BOD THAT IS IN MINE HAND UPON THE WATERS WHICH ABK IN THE BIVER, AND THET SHALL BE TURNED INTO BLOOD. And THB FISH THAT IS IN THE RIVER SHALL DIB, AND THE BIVKB SHALL STINK ; AND THK EgTPTIANS SHALL LOATHETO DRINK of the water of the riveb. And the Lord spake unto MoBfiB, Sat unto Aaron, Take THT BOD, AND STRETCH OUT THINK HAND UPON THE WATERS Of EOTPI, tc. DOCUMENTS No. II. THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. Here we bring together a group of documents not o! sufficient importance to be separately treated. THE TALMUD. What is the Talmud? We have already seen (Bk. ii. p. 75) that from tima immemorial there existed amongst the Jews certain oral traditions about the Scriptures and their inter- pretation; that these, handed down through many generations, were at length, in the early centuries of Christianity, collected and systematised in the colleges of the Scribes into a book called the Mishna ; that in course of time a "Gemara," or Commentary, was written on this book j and that the Mishna, together with its Gemara, make up what is called the Talmud. We may add here that the writing down of the Mishna occurred about the second century A.D., and that of the Gemara %bout the fourth or fifth.' It is evident that ' The Gemara, or Commentary of Jerusalem, dates about 370 A.D., Mid that of the Babylon schools about 500 A.D. According as tht Jerusalem or Babylon Gemara was attached to the Mishna, so the whole was called the Jerusalem or Babylon Talmud. THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. 133 such a book as this must necessarily contain a great many quotations from Scripture, often involving minute reference to the exact words of the text, and therefore that it ought to be one of the most valuable aids in testing the accuracy of the existing manuscripts. Unfortunately, however, owing to the extreme re- verence of the Jews for the Massoretic text, the succes- sive editors of the Talmud seem to have altered its quotations to correspond with the Hebrew manuscripts before them, so that the most careful examination of the existing Talmud copies have led to no discoveries of much importance. True, there are recorded about a thousand variations from the existing Bible, but very few of them are of any consequence. Therefore, it will be seen that the Talmud cannot be expected to count for much in the aids to Bible criticism. This is all that is absolutely necessary to be said about the Talmud for the purpose of this present work, but it is impossible here to lay down the pen. Indeed, it would be scarcely justifiable to dismiss in a few pages a book that stands out so prominently in the history of Judaism — nay, I should rather say in the history of the world. Who has not heard of the " Talmud," and formed some puzzled notion as to what the word means? Continually it meets us in all classes of reading. In science, in literature, in theology, in law, in ethics, in metaphysics, in ancient fairy-lore, the old-world name arises to us again and again, making us wonder what the curious treatise can be that touches in so many points such varied subjecta /24 THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUM!/. It is, tterefore, worth while writing a little furthei about the Talmud. One is sorely tempted to wandei off into whole chapters on its fascinating lore. So if we promise to reasonably restrain our vagrant im- pulses, the reader, we hope, will pardon a few pages more, even if not absolutely necessary to our " Lesson in Biblical Criticism." n. Conflicting Opinions. Very varied are the opinions about the Talmud. Christian writers, with whom it has been too much the custom to read non-Christian books with the object of refuting them, have given us many treatises branding it as the very curse of Judaism and of religion. They have dwelt upon our Lord's condemning its traditions. They have collected from it samples torn out of their context, silly and grotesque stories, conflicting state- ments, and specimens of the ignorant and narrow pre- judices of the nation. They have declaimed against its legendary colouring of Bible narratives — its profane and degrading representations of God, the Almighty and His angels taking part in foolish discussions of the Rabbis. They have held up their hands in horror at indelicate allusions such as they could not dare to transfer to their pages. And all these charges can be fully proved against the Talmud. In its vast and tangled mass of ancient lore many such evil things as these can be found. Indeed, at times, the reader, wandering through tho THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. I2j pages of nonsense that these wise sages wrote, will feel almost a sympathy with the belief of Carlyle, that " nine out of every ten men are fools, and he would not like to say too much about the tenth." But to dwell only on these faults would be to give a very false impres- sion of this wonderful old book, some parts of which have come down to us from almost the dawn of antiquity. It should be remembered that our Lord Himself, like all other Jewish boys, was probably, in Hia childhood, taught from the Talmud ; that many of our household words in theology have come to us, through Him, from the Talmud teaching. Redemption, Bap- tism, Grace, Salvation, Faith, Son of Man, &c., are words of old Judaism, to which He only gave a higher meaning. His rebukes, too, were directed only against its faults, not against its whole substance. The Talmud itself speaks almost as strongly as He against the " plague of Pharisaism ;" the " dyed ones who do evil deeds like Zimri, and require a goodly reward like Phinehas ; " " who preach beautifully, but do not act beautifully." The Talmud points to the Scriptures as the source of all teaching. " Turn them, and turn them again," it says, for " everything is in them." Six hundred and thirteen injunctions, says the Talmud, was Moses directed to give to the people. David reduced them to eleven in the 1 5 th Psalm : " He that walketh uprightly," &c. The prophet Micah reduced them to three : " What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" (vi. 8). Amos ia6 THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. rednced them to one : " Seek ye . Me and ye shall Uve" (v. 4). Therefore it is that the Jews indignantly chal- lenge the Christian accounts of this their greatest literary treasure next to the Bible. They point to its enforcing and explaining the Scriptures ; to its mighty influence in preserving their nationality; to its wholesome directions about purity and cleanli- ness ; to its result in many a social excellence in the character of their nation. " Nothing," say they, " can absolve the Jews from the debt of gratitude which they owe to the Talmud, the book which in so great measure has helped to make them what they are," m. " Law and Legend." To understand these conflicting testimonies, it is important to keep in mind, what has been too often overlooked, that the Talmud consists of two elements, Law and Legexd, Halachah and Hagadah, as they are called by the Jews. The former is an attempt to bring the Mosaic legislation into practical operation — that is, to bring nnder its great principles the little ordinary cases of everyday life. This is often done in a foolish and quibbling manner; it often goes into indelicate de- tails in order to be thoroughly practical ; it often, too, must be charged with making void the Word of God THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. 127 by its refinements of fanciful exposition. Yet no man who studies the history of the Jews can doubt, on the whole, its important influence for good upon the nation. The other or Legendary element consists of a series of anecdotes and sayings of the scribes, a kind of ornamental addition illustrating and enforcing the principles of the Law, or affectionately commemorating the great sages of the past. To us stolid children of the West it must seem often but a wild play of fancy and fable and humour not very much in keeping with the solemnity of its purpose ; but to the Jews, who know it best, it is a store of wise and tender and touching sayings; its allegories and parables and fairy-lore, even where they seem to us the most foolish, being credited with a lofty and beautiful secret meaning. And even our duller vision can perceive that many of its stories and moral precepts are exqui- sitely beautiful, and cannot fail to be helpful to the Jewish children, who are taught them from their earliest days. IV. Talmud Sayings. In the following section I give some specimens from the Talmud. But it is necessary to guard the reader against forming from them too favourable an impression. He must remember that they are speci- mens of the Talmud at its best, and that often a con- siderable mass of rubbish has to be waded through to find them : — 128 THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. Jerusalem was destroyed because the instruction of the young was neglected. The world is saved by the breath of the school-children. Even for the rebuilding of the Temple, schools must not be interrupted. A sage, walking in the crowded market-place, suddenly en- countered the prophet Elijah. " Who out of that crowd shall be saved ?" he asked ; and Elijah pointed to a poor turnkey, " Because he was merciful to his prisoners ; " and next to two common workmen pleasantly talking as they passed. The sage rushed up to them and asked, "I pray you, what are your saving works?" But the puzzled workmen replied, " We are poor men who live by our trade. We know not of any good works in us. We try to be cheerful and good-natured. We talk to the sad, and cheer them to forget their grief. If we know of two who have quarrelled, we talk to them, and persuade them to be friends. This is our whole life." Life is a passing shadow, says the Scripture. Is it the shadow of a tower or of a tree ? A shadow that prevails for a while 1 Nay, it is the shadow of a bird in his flight ; away flies the bird, and there is neither bird nor shadow. He who has more learning than good works is like a tree with many branches but few roots, which the first wind throws on its face ; while he whose good works are greater than his knowledge is like a tree with many roots and few branches, which all the winds of heaven cannot uproot Teach thy tongue to say, " I do not know." Prayer is Israel's only weapon, a weapon inherited from it« fathers and trieil in a thousand battles. Moses made a serpent of brass and put it on a pole ; and it came to pass, if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld that seiBent of brass he lived. Dost think that a serpent kUletk THE TALMUD AND VHh TARGUMS. 129 or giveth life ? But as long as Israel are looking up to theii Fathei in Heaven they wiU not die. We read that while, in the contest with Amalek, Moses lifted up his arms Israel prevailed. Did Moses' hands make war or break wart But this is to tell you that as long as Israel are looking upwards and humbling their hearts before the Father in Heaven they will prevail ; if not, they fall. " If your God hates idolatry," asked a heathen, " why does He not destroy it ? " Ana they answered him, " Behold, men, worship the sun, the moon, the stars. Would you have Him destroy this beautiful world for the sake of the foolish ? " If there is anything biid to say of you, say it yourself. Commit a sin twice and you will think it quite allowable. Think of three things, whence thou comest, whither thou goest, and to whom thou shalt have to give account, even the All Holy, praised be He ! Four shall not enter into Paradise : the scoffer, the liar, the hypocrite, and the slanderer. To slander is to murder. Love your wife like yourself ; honour her more than yourself, Whoever lives unmarried lives without joy, without comfort, without blessing. Descend a step in choosing a wife. If she b« small, bend down to her and whisper in her ear. He who for- sakes the love of his youth, God's altar weeps for him. He who sees his wife die before him has, as it were, been present at the destruction of the sanctuary itself — the world grows dark around him. It is woman alone through which God's blessings are vouch- safed to a house. She teaches the children, speeds the hus- band to the place of wo];ship, and welcomes him when he sjo THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. retnnu ; she keejis the house godly and pore, and God's bleesing rests on all these things. He Wno manieg for money, his children shall be a cnne to hink Th« hoase that does not open to the poor shall open to the phyBiclan. • •••*•■• The day is short and the work is heavy, but the labourers are idle, though the reward be great. It is not incumbent on thee te complete the work, but thou must not therefore cease from it, If thou hast worked much great shall be thy reward, for the Master who employed thee is faithful in His payment But know that the true reward is not of this world. A man stands at the door of his patron's hoose. He dare not wk for the patron himself, but for his favourite slave or his son, who then goes in and tells the master inside, " This man, N. N., is standing at the gate ; shall he come in or not t " Not so the Holy ; praised be He 1 If misfortune come upon a man, let him not cry to Michael or to Gabriel, but unto Me let him cry, and I will answer him right speedily, as it is written, Every one who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. V. Bible Commentary. Here are a few specimens of its Bible commentary : — Cain was ploughing his fields. Abel, leading his flocks to pasture, crossed the ground which his brother was tilling. In a wrathful spirit, Cain approached Abel, saying, " Where- fore eomest thou with thy flocks to dwell in and to feed upoi the land which belongs to me t " And Abel answered, " Wherefore eatest thou of the flesh of my sheep t Wherefore clothe thyself in garments fashioned from their wool t Pay me for the flesh which thou hast eaten, for the THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. 131 garmenU in which thou art clothed, for they are mine, eren a« this ground is thine." Then said Cain to his brother, " Behold, thou art in my power. If I ihoold see fit to slay thee now, to-day, who wou] 1 avenge thy death?" " God, who has placed us upon this earth," replied Abel. " He is the judge who rewardeth the pious man according to hia deeds, and the wicked according to his wickedness. Thou canst not slay me and hide from Him the action. He will surely punish thee; ay, even for the evil words which thou hast spoken to me but now." This answer increased Cain's wrathful feelings, and raising the implement of his labour which he was holding in his hand, he struck hia brother suddenly therewith and killed him. And it came to pass after this rash action that Gain grieved and wept bitterly. Then arising, he dug a hole in the ground and buried therein his brother's body from the light of day. And after this, the Lord appeared to Cain and said to him — " Where is Abel thy brother, who was with thee 1 " And Cain replied unto the Lord — "I know not. Am I my brother's keeper?" Then aaid the Lord — " What hast thou done ? Thy brother's blood cries to Die from the ground." Abram, when quite a child, beholding the brilliant splendour of the noonday sun and the reflected glory which it cast upon all objects around, he said, " Surely this brilliant light must be a god ; to him will I render worship.'' And he worshipped the sun and prayed to it. But as the day lengthened the sun's bright- ness faded, the radiance which it cast upon the earth was lost in the lowering clouds of night, and as the twilight deepened the youth ceased his supplication, saying, " No, this cannot be a god. Where then can I find the Creator, He who made the heaveni and the earth 1" He looked towards the west, the south, the north, and to the east. The sun disappeared from his view ; nature became enveloped in the pall of a past day. Then the moon arose, and when Abram saw it shinins in the heaveni 132 THE TALMUD AND THE FARGUMS. Burrounded by its myriads of Blars, he said, " Perhaps these are the gods who have created all things," and he uttered prayer* to them. But when the morning dawned and the stars paled, and the moon faded into silvery whiteness and was lost in the returning glory of the sun, Abram knew God, and said, " There is a higher power, a Supreme Being, and these luminaries are but His servants, the work of His hands." From that day, even until the day of his death, Abram knew the Lord, and walked in all His ways. And Abram sought his father when he was sur- rounded by his officers, and he spoke to him, saying — " Father tell me, I pray, where I may find the God whc created the heavens and the earth, thee, and nie, and all the people in the world.* And Terah answered, "My son, the creator of all things is here with us in the house." Then said Abram, " Show him to me, my father.'' And Terah led Abram into an inner apartment, and pointing to the twelve large idols and the many smaller ones around, he said, " These are the gods who created the heavens and the earth, thee, me, and all the people of the world." Abram then sought his .motlier, saying, " My mother, behold, my fatlier has shown to me the gods who created the earth and all that it contains ; therefore prepare for me, I pray thee, a kid for a sacrifice, that the gods of my father may partake of the same and receive it favourably." Abrani's mother did as her son had requested her, and Abram placed the food which she prepared before the idols, but none Btretclied forth a hand to eat. Then Abram jested, and stid, "Perchance 'tis not exactly to . their tastes, or mayhap the quantity appears stinted. I wiU prepare a larger oflFering, and strive to make it still more savoury.'' Next day Abram requested his mother to prepare two kids, and with her greatest skill, ami placing them before the idols, he watched, with the same result as on the previous day. Then Abram exclaimed, " Woe to my father and to this evil generation ; woe to those who incline their hearts to vanity and worship senseless images without the power to smell or eat, to THE TALMUD AND THE TAROUMS. 133 see or hear. Mouthg they have, but sounds they cannot utter ; eyeg they hare, but lack all power to see ; they have ears that cannot hear, hands that cannot move, and feet that cannot walk. SenBeless they are as the men who wrought them ; senseless all who trust in them and bow before them." And seiring an iron implement, he destroyed and broke with it all the images save one, into the hands of which he placed the iron which he had nsed. The noise of this proceeding reached the ears of Terah, who hurried to the apartment, where he found the broken idols and the food which Abram had placed before them. In wrath and indignation he cried out unto his son, saying, " What is this that thou hast done unto my gods } " And Abram answered, "I brought them savoury food, and behold, they all grasped for it with eagerness at the same time, all save the largest one, who, annoyed and displeased with their greed, seized that iron which he holds and destroyed them." " False are thy words," answered Terah in anger. " Had the»e images the breath of life, that they should move and act as thon hast said 1 Did I not fashion them with my own hands 1 How, then, could the larger destroy the smaller ones 1 " " Then why serve senseless, powerless gods 1 " replied Abram ; " gods who can neither help thee in thy need nor hear thy sup- plications t " VI. The Legend of Sandalphon. Some of our readers will remember Longfellow's exquisite presentation of the ancient Talmud legend : — SANDALPHON. " Have you read in the Talmud of old, In the legends the Rabbins have told, Of the limitless realms of the air, — Have you read it, — the marvellous story Of Sandalphon, the Angel of Glory, Sandalphon, the Angel of Frayex t 134 THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. How erect at the outermost gates Of the City Celeitial he waits, With his feet on the ladder of light, That, crowded with angels unnumhered, By Jacob was seen as he slumbered Alone in the desert by night 1 The Angels of Wind and of Fire Chant only one hymn and expire With the song's irresistible stress ; Expire in their rapture and wonder, As harp-strings are broken asunder By music they throb to express I But serene in the rapturous throng, Unmoved by the rush of the song, With eyes unimpassioned and slow, Among the dead angels, the deathless Sandalphon stands listening breathless To sounds that ascend from below ; — From the spirits on earth that adore ; From the souls that entreat and implore In the fervour and passion of prayer ; From the hearts that are broken with losseSj And weary from dragging the crosses Too heavy for mortals to bear. And he gathers the prayers as he stands. And they change into flowers in his hanJk Into garlands of purple and red ; And beneath the great arch of the portal, Through the streets of the City Immortal, Is wafted the fragrance they shed. It is but a legend, I know — A fable, a phantom, a show Of the ancient Rabbinical lore ; THB TALMUD AND THE TAROUMS. /3S Yet the old medinval tradition, The beantifal, strange supentition, But haunts me and holds me the more. When I look from my window at night, And the welkin above is all white, All throbbing and panting with stars, Among them majestic is standing Sandalphon the angel, expanding His pinions in nebulous bars. And the legend, I feel, is a part Of the hunger and thirst of the heart ; The frenzy and fire of the brain. That grasps at the fruitage forbidden. The golden pomegranates of Eden, To quiet its fever and pain." * vn. An Ancient " Rip Van Winkle." The following illastration from the Babylonian Talmud {Taanith, fol. 23 o and V) will show (i) how Bible qnotations occur which may be nsed for textual criticism; (2) the Rabbis' fanciful method of Bible * LongfellowBeema to have been a good deal attracted by the Talmud. There are few more beautiful things in bis works than the Legend of the Rabbi ben Levi, who sprang over the walls of Heaven with the Bword of the Angel of Death in his hand, and thus obtained for man the boon that the dread Angel must '' walk on earth unseen for ever- more." The reader rnvj remember in the " Golden Legend " the scene of the Kabbi and the lohool-children : — " Come hither, Judas Iscariot, Say if thy lesson thou hast got From the Rabbinical Book or not t " and bow, after Judas has glibly answered in the great Talmud mys- teriTS, the old pedagogue proceeds to call np " little Jesos, the car- penter's SOB." 136 THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUM5. interpretation ; and, perhaps, (3) the origin of the favourite fairy-tale, " The Sleeping Beauty," who slept for seventy years, and of Washington Irving's famous story of " Rip Van Winkle : " — " Choni ha-Maagol was all hi» life unable to understand the Biblical passage, ' When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream ' (Fa. cxitI i). ' Can serenty years be regarded as a dream 1 How is it possible,' he asked, ' for a man to remain for aeventy years asleep } ' One day, whilst on a journey, he saw a man planting a carob-tree, and asked him how long a period he expected would elapse before the tree became fruitful. ' Seventy years,' was the reply. ' Do you then expect to live seventy years and to eat of the fruit ? ' ' When I entered the world,' was the answer, * I found carob- trees in abundance. Even as my fathers planted for me, in like manner shall I also plant for those that are to come after me.' " Choni sat down to his meal, and a deep sleep fell upon him, and he slumbered. The rock closed up around him, and he was hidden from the sight of men. And thus he lay for seventy years. When he awoke and rose to his feet, lo! he beheld t man eating of the fruit of the very carob-tree that he had seen planted. Choni asked, ' Dost thou know who it was that planted this tree t ' ' My grandfather.' Then Choni knew that he had slept on for seventy years. He went to his house and asked where the son of Choni ha-Maagol was. ' His son,' they told him, ' is dead. His grandson you can see if you will.' * I am Choni ha-Maagol!' he exclaimed; but no one believed him. " He thence turned his steps to the House of Learning, and he heard the Rabbis saying, ' We have resolved this difficulty as we used to do when Choni ha-Maagol was aUve;' for in times past, when Choni went to the meeting, he was able to expound every subject under discussion. ' I am Choni ha- Maagol ! ' he cried for the second time. But again none would believe him, neither did they treat him with honour. Broken- hearted, he left the haunts of men, and prayed for death, and his pimyer was answered. ' This,' eays Ravah, ' is the meaning of the saying : To the friendless man Death cometh as a blessing."^ THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. 137 vm. "The House that Jack Built." It may seem strange to be searching in the holy books of the Jews for the origin of fairy-tales ;. but what would yon say, my reader, if you found in their later service- books the source of " The House that Jack Built ; " and, moreover, if you were told that this queer old nursery rhyme is but an adaptation of a solemn Passover hymn of ancient days, by means of which the Jewish children learned in parable the history of their nation ? The poem is found in the Seder Hagadah (Passover Service-Book), fol. 23, 183 1. It is translated from the Chaldee. I take the interpretation from the small edition pub- lished by Vallentyne, Bedford Square, London : — A kid, a kid, my father bought For two pieces of money : A kid, a kid. 2. Then came the cat, and ate the kid, That my father bought For two pieces of money : A kid, a kid. Then came the dog, and bit the cat, That ate the kid, That my father bought For two pieces of money : A kid< a kid. The Hd, a clean animal, referi to Israel, "the one pecnlUr people upon earth," which God purchased (Exod. XT, 16) for Himself by means of the two precious tables of the Law. The cat refers to Babylon, "De- roured the kid" is descriptire of the Babylonian captir- ity, which swallowed np Jewish nation- ality, A.M. 3338. The dog means Feraia, by whose power Babylon was orerthrown. »38 THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. Then came the staff, and beat the dog, That bit the cat, That ate the kid. That my father bought For two pieces of money : A kid, a kid. ThejtaJfiiOreeoe, which put an eod to tha FsnUn domi- Bation. Then came the fire, and burned the staff, That beat the dog, That bit the cat. That ate the kid, That my father bought For two pieces of money : A kid, a kid. The ire refers to Rome. Then came the water, and quenched the fire. That burned the staf^ That beat the dog, That bit the cat, That ate the kid. That my father bought For two pieces of money : A kid, a kid. The water refers to the Turks, de- •oeiidanti of Ish- mael, who wrested the Holy Land from tha power of Borne. Then came the ox, and drank the water, That quenched the fire, That burned the staff. That beat the dog. That bit the cat. That ate the kid. That my father bought For two pieces of money : A kid, a kid. The 01 means Edota (the Euro- pean nations), who wiU in the latter days rescue the Holy Land from the possession of Ish- mael. (See Abar- banel on Eiek, XTTJT.) THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. 139 Th« btitoier T«f en to the feiurfnl war wMeh will then nio- oeed, when the oen- federated anniei of Qog and Magog, Ferria, Oosh, and Pul will come up "Uke the tempeat*^ to drire the lone of Edom from Falei- tine (Eiek. zxxriii,, xxzix.). The Angel of Dtath ii a great peitilenoe, in which all the foei of Iirael ■kaUperiih. 8. Then came the butcher, and slew the ox That drank the water, That quenched the fire, That burned the staff, That beat the dog That bit the cat, That ate the kid, That my father bought For two pieces of money : A Ud, a kid. 9- Then came the Angel of Death, and killed the butcher, That view the ox, That drank the water. That quenched the fire, That burned the 8ta£^ That beat the dog, That bit the cat, That ate the kid. That my father bought For two pieces of money : A kid, a kid. la Then came the Holy One, blessed be He ! And killed the Angel of Death, That killed the butcher, That slew the ox. That drank the water, That quenched the fire^ That burned the sta£^ That beat the dog, That bit the cat, That ate the kid, That my father bought For two pieces of money : A kid, a kid.^ > It would seem as if from this ancesti? oame not only " The Hoote Ibn last Terse de- scribes the establish- ment of Ood's king- dom on earth, when brael shall be re- stored nnder Mes- siah, the son of Dand. I40 THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. THE TARGUMS. The Talmud has tempted us so far beyond our limits that very little space is left for dealing with the Targums, the Chaldee paraphrases of Scripture in use for the teaching of the people. The reader will remember the scene at p. 6i, where Ezra read to the returned exiles from his manuscript of the Law, and the Scribes had to " give the sense and cause them to understand the reading." This is the first instance we have of a Targum or paraphrase. It afterwards became a regular custom in the synagogue, for the sake of the common people who had lost all know- ledge of the holy tongue, that, when the words of the Law were read, an interpreter should translate into vernacular Aramaic, and that he should expand his translation into a free paraphrase of the meaning, that all the people might easily understand. This inter- preter, or " metnrgeman " (our English word " drago- man," which occurs so frequently in stories of modern Eastern travel), was bound by certain rules : he must wait till the reader had finished his verse or pas- sage ; neither reader nor meturgeman is to raise his voice one above the other ; the meturgeman mnst not lean against a pillar or beam, but stand erect with fear and reverence ; he mast never use a written that Jack Built," bat alio that other queer doggerel of the old woman and the kid, "Butcher, butcher, kill Oz, Ox will not drink Water, Water will not quench Fire, Fire wUl not burn Stick, Stick will not beat Kid- and J cannot get home till midnight, " THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. 141 •'Targum," but must deliver his interpretation "ex- tempore," lest it might seem that he was reading out of the Law itself, and thus the Scriptures be held accountable for his teaching. In course of time, however, the same causes which led to the writing of the Talmud led also to the per- mission that Targums might be written, and thus these paraphrases have come down to us to help in testing the accuracy of the teit. Their value for this purpose, however, is but small, not only on account of the loose and fanciful nature of their comments, but also because the oldest dates no farther back than the early Christian centuries, when the present Massoretic text was already pretty well established. Their freedom in dealing with the Scrip- tures makes it difficult to tell what were the exact words of the text which was being interpreted, but it is clear that the sacred manuscripts before them must have corresponded very closely with those in our hands to-day. The Targum of Onkelos on the Penta- teuch is the most valuable, owing to its keeping so literally to its text. There are, besides, the Targum of Jonathan, the Jerusalem Targum, and others, but it is not necessary to enter more fully into details. Perhaps the following little specimen may interest the reader, and give him a clearer idea of the use of the Targums for the purpose of textual criticism : — 142 THE TALMUD AND THE TARGUMS. BIBLB. OlB. UL at. Airo THE LOBD OoD SAID, Behold, THB HAH IB BECX)ME AS ONI OF US, TO KKOW QOOD AND EVIL : AHD NOW, LEST HE PUT FOBTH ms HAND, AND TAEB AMO OF THE TUBS or LIFE, AND BAT, AND UVX FOB STBB. TARGUM OF ONKELOS. And THB LoBD God said, Bb- HOLD, Adam is thb onlt ONI in thi WORLD KNOWING GOOD AND BVIt : PEBCHANOB NOW HE MIGHT STEBTOH FORTH HI8 HAND, AND TAKB ALSO FBOU THE TBEE OF LIFE, AND EAT, AND LIVE FOB EVBB- HOBB. TARGUM OF JONATHAN. And thb Lobd God said to thb angbl8 that wbbb HINiaTBBINO BEFOBB HlH, LO, THBBB IS Adam aloni on thf EARTH, AS I AM ALONI IN THB HIGHEST HEAVEN, AND THBBB WILL BPBING FBOH HIM THOSE WHO KKOYI HOW TO DIBTIN- OCISH BdWEEN GOOD AND EVIL. If he bad kept thb OOHHANDMENT THAT I OOM- MANDBD HI WOULD HAVB BEEN UVINO AND LASTING, UKE THB TBEE OF LIFE, FOB IVEBMOBI. Now, SINOB HI HAS NOT KEPT WHAT I COM- MANDED, WE DEOBEE AGAINST HIM, AND EXPEL HIM FBOM TEE Gabden of Eden, be- FOBB HE MAT BTBBTCH OUT HIS BAND AND TAKE FBOM THE FBurra of thb tbd of UFE, FOB IF En ATE TBEBI- VmOM BI WOULD LIVI AND aniAIN FOB BVE& DOCUMENT No. IH. THE BIBLE OF "THE SEVENTY.' The Apostles' Bible. We have now to tell of a very wonderful book, the most important as well as the most fomoas version of the Bible that the world has ever seen. It was the first translation of Holj Scripture in existence. It, and not the original Hebrew, was the Bible chiefly used by our Lord, the Bible used by the Apostles * and Evangelists, the Bible used by Jews and GentUeB alike in the early days of Christianity. It is the source of most of the ancient versions of the Old Testament. It supplies the chief theological temu of the New. It is to-day in the Eastern Church the standard, the sacred text, fully installed in the place of the original Hebrew. This rival of the Hebrew Bible text was the cele- brated Greek version of the Old Testament known as "The Septuagint," or Bible of the Seventy, which in the two centuries before Christ was the recognised ' Out of thirty-seven quotations made by our Lord, thirty-three agree almost. verbatim with this version. "What saith the Scripture? says St.Paul, and immediately he proceeds to quote the Septuagint. 144 THE BIBLE OP " THE SEVENTY* Scriptnre amongst all the " Jews of the Diapersion." What our Anthorised Version is to the English-speak- ing races, that was the Septuagint to the ancient world. It was the " People's Bible," as far as such a name is applicable in speaking of those ancient days. It was written in the popular language. It was sold at the popular price, comparing with the Hebrew as our " Shilling Popular Editions " of books to-day com.' pare with the elaborate guinea volumes. Consequently its influence was very important. It kept alive the knowledge of God when the " holy tongue " had fallen into disuse. It spread amongst the Gentiles the anti- cipation of the coming Messiah. It was the safe- guard of Judaism amongst the scattered Israelites until Judaism had become a withered branch too dead and sapless to be worth safeguarding any longer, and then it became Christianity's chariot as it passed forth from its birthplace in Palestine to conquer the world. Humanly speaking, it is hard to see how Christianity could ever have succeeded without the Septuagint Bible. Besides all this, it has a further claim on our atten- tion here. It has much to do with Old Testament Biblical criticism as a most important witness of the Hebrew text, from which it was translated before Massoretic or even Talmud days. Whence, then, came this Septuagint version ? Who were its authors ? Why was it made ? What is its value in the investigation of the text ? A\CIENT COPIES OF THE SEPTUAGIXT. ■ or iTipc>a.ro >ir>iii. i NerKeNxp T No. 1. — A half-burnt fragment of the Codex Geneseos Cottonianns, a very valuable Septuagint Manuscript about 1400 years old. No, 2. — Facsimile of its writing, full size. No. 6. — Beginning of the 29th Psalm, from a papyrus manuscript of Septuagint in the British Museum, (Photographed h]i kind permission of Professor Westioood, Oxford, froyn tlie Palceographia Sacrn Pictoria.) To face page i44-l THE BIBLE OF "THE SEVENTY." 145 The Romance of Aristeas. There is a curious old letter extant professing to be written by Aristeas, a distinguished oflBcer of Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, in the third century B.C. It carries us back to the days of the famous Alex- andrian Library, the literary treasure-house of the ancient world. It tells that the book-loving King Ptolemy, with the true passion of a collector, had set his heart on adding to his treasures a translation of the Hebrew Pentateuch, of which he had heard through his chief librarian, Demetrius Phalereus. He was advised by Aristeas that it was no easy matter to procure it. " You certainly will not get it," said he, " while those thousands of Jewish slaves are suffering throughout your land." (I wonder if the King knew the story of his far-back predecessors and those other Jewish slaves which his new document would tell of.) Ptolemy, however, was not to be baffled. He ordered an enormous sum of money to be expended, and 198,000 captives were immediately set free. Then was arranged a gorgeous procession to Jeru- salem, of which this host of freed men formed the chief part — a second exodus of Israel from Egypt. With them they bore splendid presents to Eleazar, the high priest, fifty talents of gold, seventy talents of silver, besides tables and cisterns and bowls of gold 146 THE BIBLE OF "THE SBVBNTY.' in laTish abundance ; also a letter from the king, requesting that tiiere might be sent to him a copy of the Law, and Jewish scholars capable of translating it. Then comes the equally gorgeous account of the return ; of the seventy-two learned Hebrews, six from each tribe ; of the exquisitely fine parchment manu- scripts of the Law, " written in gold in the Jewish letters ; " of the royal reception prepared for them m Alexandria ; the seven days' feasting in the presence of the king ; the seventy questions testing their wis- dom ; and then the magnificent study prepared for them by the sea, away from the bustle of the noisy streets, where, in seventy -two days "of co-operation and confer- ence," they gave to the world the Septuagint version ! Aristeas had surely not stinted in his wonders; but in his day, as in our own, such stories seldom lost in repetition. So we find in the early Christian ages the additional touches that there were seventy- two separate cells-' (some say thirty-six) on the rocky shores of the island of Pharos, in which the translators worked independently of each other, and it was found at the end that each had produced a translation exactly word for word with all the others. Therefore, of course, the work was miraculous — a direct inspira- tion of the Spirit of God ! When it was ended, Demetrius, the chief libranan, 1 Justin Mftrtyr, in the second centuiy, tallii us that be was shown by his guide at Alexandria the iruins of these Septuagint cells I If his story does not prove the inspiration of the Septuagint, it proves, at any rate, that, in the matter of the tales of tourist guides, there is notbiag new under the sun. THE BIBLE OF " THE SEVENTY." 147 Bummoned the Jews of the city to the house where the translators had worked, and read the translatioh, which was heartily approved. Curses were pronounced on any who should dare to add to or take from it. The Jews received permission to take a copy. The king rejoiced greatly, and commanded the books to be carefully kept. He gave to each translator three robes and two talents of gold, with other gifts; to Eleazar, the high priest, he sent ten silver-footed tables and a cup of thirty talents, and begged that any of the translators who wished might come and see him again, for he delighted to meet such men, and to spend his wealth upon them. m. Who made the Septuagint? This story, substantially repeated by Josephns, by the famous Philo the Jew, and by many of the Christian fathers, was generally received as the true account of the origin of the Septuagint until about two hundred years since. It probably explains the name " Septuagint," or " Seventy," applied to the version^ (which is usually denoted by the numerals Ixx.) from the number of the translators, and, doubt- less, it also accounts in a great measure for the high repute in which this version so long was held. ' It is by some derived from the sanction given to the version b; the Seventy of the Alexandrian Sanhedrim. It is held by others that the name Septuagint originally belonged to the Alexandrian Library, from the number of its founders, and was thence applied to this, one of its most famous documents. 148 THE BIBLE OP "THE SEVENTY.' It i8 now universally considered to be a mere piece of Eastern romance, invented to uphold the credit of the work. But it undoubtedly rests on a basis of fact. All the evidence points clearly to the facts, which are amply confirmed by the study of the work itself, that this Greek version originated in Alexandria in the time of the earlier Ptolemies, about 280 B.C., and that the nucleus of the work was certainly the Pentateuch. That the literary tastes of the Egyptian king had something to do with its origin may also be true, just as in New Testament days a Persian translation was ordered by the Emperor Akbar. But, clearly, the real cause of its existence must be sought in the needs of the scattered Jews of the Dispersion, who knew scarcely anything of Hebrew, and whose common language was the universal Greek. One part of the story that must certainly, we fear, be put aside as pure fiction is that of the Palestine manuscripts and the scholars from Jerusalem coming to translate them. An examination of the work itself, with its imperfect knowledge of Hebrew, its mistakes about Palestine names of places, its Egyptian words and turns of expression, its Macedonic Greek which prevailed at Alexandria, and its free tendencies in translation, so opposed to the superstitious literalism of the Jewish schools, at once puts the Palestine origin of the version completely out of court. It was made by Jewish scholars of Alexandria, and not all of them very good scholars either, judging from their work. They show in many places a very imperfect THE BIBLE OP "THE SEVENTY." 149 knowledge of Hebrew, and indeed of Greek too, for that matter. They frequently mistake ordinary words for proper names, and sometimes try to translate proper names as if they were ordinary words. The similarity of the Hebrew letters is one of their great stumbling-blocks. We have already given examples of their errors from this cause as well as from their differences of Hebrew pronunciation. There are many mistakes, too, from the wrongly dividing or joining of words written probably without any division in the Hebrew manuscript before them ; as, for example, in Pb. cvi. 7, (d yam, " at the sea," which they translate, alyam, " going in." rv. Its Critical Value. As to the value of the Septuagint in Textual Criticism, opinions are widely divided. Some scholars, pointing to the great antiquity of the translation, and to its frequent use by our Lord and the Apostles, would have us receive it as superior almost to the Massoretic Hebrew text. Others would entirely ignore its authority, telling us that its variations from the Hebrew arose " out of the carelessness and caprice of transcribers, their uncritical and wanton passion for emendation, and their defective knowledge of the Hebrew tongue " (Keil., Introd.), The truth lies between these extremes. It is true that this Septuagint has been translated from a very ancient Hebrew Bible. It is true, toq ijo THE BIBLB OP "THE SEVENTY." that in the time of the Septuagint translators some variations existed in the Hebrew text. There can be little doubt either that in some places at least, where it differs from the present Hebrew, the Septuagint pre- serves for US the truer reading. But it would be very dangerous to attempt many corrections on its sole authority. We have seen already what stupid mis- takes it sometimes made, and there is much besides to make us accept its evidence with great caution where it differs from the Hebrew. The several books were evidently translated by men of very different attainments in scholarship, and without any after revision to bring the various parts into har- mony. Then these Egyptian Jews were by no means hampered with the rigid Palestine notions. The fact that they ventured to translate the Bible at all out of the holy tongue, which would seem almost sacrilege to the Jews of Tiberias ; their admission of the apocryphal books into their Canon ; and still more, perhaps, the existence of a schismatical temple in Bgypt,^ with its priesthood and ritual, while they still recognised Jeru- salem as the mother Church, all indicate a tone of thought much freer and less scrupulous than that of the Holy Land. And accordingly we trace in their translation a bold, free handling of the text before them, often expanding and paraphrasing to bring out ' During the terrible Syrilan persecution in Palestine, about 2CXD B.C., Onias, son of the murdered high priest, fled to Egypt King Ptolemy received him kindly, and gave him a disused heathen temple at Leonto- polia, which was converted into a Jewish sanctuary, with its Aaronio priesthood and temple rituaL THE BIBLE OP "THE SEVENTY." 151 the sense, or to gratify their love of diffuse writing. Evidently the meaning, not the strict letter of the text, was the chief consideration with them. True, the sense was, on the whole, fairly rendered. Indeed, were it otherwise we conld not understand the use of the version by our Lord and His Apostles. But, at the same time, it is clear that this freeness, however use- ful, is a serious defect in an instrument of textual criticism when the object is to find out exactly what Hebrew words were in the manuscripts used by the translators. But the chief difficulty in using the Septuagint is, that it is very difficult now to tell, with any certainty, what the Septuagint originally said. Even in the days of Origan, 1 600 years ago, it had already grown so cor- rupt as to greatly need the revision of it which he attempted, and unfortunately his well-meant efforts only made matters worse. He compared it with the Hebrew Bibles of his day, supplying from the Hebrew what seemed to be omissions, and noting what seemed to him mistakes or additions. These additions and omis- sions, &c., he denoted by asterisks and crosses and other literary marks. But, as might be expected, in the course of frequent copying these marks of his got often misplaced, and often dropped out altogether, so that the cure in time became really worse than the disease. Much has been done for it in recent years, but much stiU remains to be done, in the collecting of ancient copies and recording their various readings. As it 152 THE BIBLE OF •* THE SEVENTY.' stands at present, the revisers cannot well be blamed that they hesitated to use it more freely in their work, though few would be inclined to go the length of their American confreres, who practically advised that it should be rejected altogether. Famous Septuagint Manuscripts. The most ancient copies known of the Septuagint are the Vatican Codex, an old manuscript of the fourth century, preserved in the Vatican Library at Rome, and the " Sinaitic," whose romantic story is graphically told by Dr. Tischendorf, the finder of its scattered sheets in the old paper basket at Mount Sinai (see photograph on opposite page). A little later in date is the Codex Alexandrinus, in which we have a special interest, {is it belongs to our own nation, and may be seen any day in its case in the British Museum." ^ There is a small facsimile of it in the plate facing p. 144, which exhibits also the burnt fragment of another celebrated Septuagint copy, the Codex Geneeeos Oottonianus. X For an account of these manuscripts see the writer's "How we got our Bible." Sampson Low, Marston & Co. Ltd. DOCUMENTS No. IV. A BUNDLE OP GREEK BIBLES. A witness to the Bible of tiie Scribes and Pharisees. I place together in this bundle a set of old documents which are of considerable value in the textual criticism of the Old Testament. Chief amongst them are portions of three translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, made during the second century A.D. by three scholars, named Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, and, there- fore, witnessing to the Hebrew text that existed in the time of our Lord, and probably long before. I dare not tax the reader's patience with any detailed account of these old Bibles. Let me, therefore, draw forth a single version from my bundle, and give it and its story as a specimen of the rest. Renegade and his Bible. In the lovely city of Sinope, on the shores of the Black Sea, there lived in the second century a heathen gentleman named Aquila, a man of high position, con- aected by marriage with the imperial family of Borne. 154 A BUNDLE OP GREEK BIBLES. One advantage of being connected with royalty seems to have been, in Aqnila's day at least, the choice of a comfortable post in the Civil Service. It is said that by the Emperor's direction he was commissioned to Jerusalem to examine and report on certain public buildings, and while residing there the amateur sur- veyor became converted to Christianity. He was not, however, a very satisfactory convert. He still retained many of his heathen superstitions; and one day it was found necessary by the heads of the courageous little Church at Jerusalem that he should be publicly reprimanded. It was not the first time, nor will it be the last, that an honest rebuke haa been the cause of a " 'vert " to some other religious body. Aqnila, in anger, joined himself to the Jews ; and having become circumcised, he soon began to pose as a most zealous defender of the Mosaic Law and ritual.^ At this time a fierce controversy raged between Jews and Christians as to the interpretation of certain Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament ; and as the Septuagint was the version chiefly appealed to by the latter, it was sternly banned by the Rabbis as the "Christians' Bible." They even went so far as to compare the " accursed day when the seventy elders wrote the Law in Greek for the king " (Ptolemy) with ' The statement that Aquila had become a Christian before becoming a proselyte to Judaism rests on the authority of Epiphanius, a Cbnrcb writer of about A.d. 350. It is only right to add that no previous writer refers to the circumstance, though, if it be true, it should have a Conaid'erab1<^ hpftrin^ on th« oHjept anfl <^pirit nf bis vflrsion- A BUNDLE OP GREEK BIBLES. 155 that other day of evil in the ancient time " when Israel made for itself the golden calf." It was necessary, of course, under these circum- stances, that there should be a Greek translation other than the Septuagint for the use of the Jews who could not read the Hebrew, and their aristocratic convert, being a man of some scholarship, determined to under- take this task himself. The Jews were delighted with the new work, and it gained so large a circulation that a new edition (that highest pleasure of an author) was called for within a few years of its first issue. This is the specimen version, or rather the remains of it, that I have drawn out of my bundle of docu- ments to exhibit. It follows the Hebrew with slavish literalness, so as, indeed, quite to spoil its own Greek. But this defect is its chief virtue for the purpose of textual criticism, as, of course, it makes it easier to find out the exact Hebrew words which the translator had before him. It would, therefore, be a most valuable help if we had it perfect; all the more so, since Aquila is said to have become a student of the great College of Tiberias, and on that account would be a witness to the very best Palestine text. Some interesting traces may be found in it cS. the controversial purpose with which it was prepared ; for example, in Isa. yii. 1 4, " Behold a virgin shall conceive," &c., where he translates the word "young woman ; " not exactly a false translation, but yet evi- 156 A BUNDLE OP GREEK BIBLES. dently intended to tnm the point of the Christians' argument. Any notice of the other versions in the bundle would probably only tire the reader. From this account of Aquila's he will form some notion of the rest.'^ Therefore, it is only necessary, further, to say that the evidence of these versions goes to show that the Hebrew manuscripts from which they were trans- lated in the second century corresponded very nearly with the Massoretic manuscripts in our hands to-day, though, at the same time, they exhibit some inte- resting variations which the Septuagint and other versions frequently support, ^ St. Jerome tells us that Aquila sought to reproduce the Hebrew word for word ; that Symmachus aimed at a clear exposition of the sense ; while Theodotion's object was to make a revised edition of the Septoagiut, DOCUMENT No. V. THE SYRIAC BIBLB. I. St. Ephraem the Syrian, Once upon a time, some fifteen hundred years ago, there lived a great father of the Syrian Church, generally known to scholars now by the name of St, Ephraem the Syrian. He was a very learned and thoughtful old writer, yet his name would probably have been as little remembered as that of many other learned and thoughtful writers of his day had it not been for its connection, partly accidental, with two great facts in the history of Biblical criticism. The first was, that when the old man had been nearly a thousand years in his grave, some enthusiastic admirer one day wanted to copy out one of his lec- tures. But parchment for the purpose was expensive and difficult to be got. So, providing himself with a piece of pumice-stone, he coolly scrubbed out the writing of a very ancient and valuable copy of the Scriptures, for which there was probably little demand in that day, and wrote in its stead St. Ephraem's dis- courses. This old parchment was brought from the 158 THE SYRIAC BIBLE. Bast with a nnmber of other manuBcriptB in the six- teenth century, and afterwards having passed into the possession of her family, was presented to the Eoyal Library at Paris by the infamous Catharine de Medicis. In later days, when Biblical criticism had become an important branch of study, some dim traces of the ancient writing appearing underneath called the attention of scholars to the document, and by the repeated applications of chemicals the old obliterated Bible was at length partially restored, and the Paris Library thus became the possessor of one of the greatest literary treasures iu the world, a Bible manuscript dating from the fifth century. From its accidental connection with the lectures of the old Syrian, this stained and blotted old Bible is now known as the " Codex of Ephraem." (See Plate, opposite.) The other fact is, that Ephraem's greatest work was a commentary on the Syriac Bible of his day; and long ages afterwards, when the importance of the Syriac Bible became recognised in textual criticism and all the ancient Bibles such as Ephraem used had utterly disappeared, this commentary of his became, of course, a most valuable source of information about the old Syriac text. n. The Oldest Christian Bible. This Syriac Bible is the most ancient of all the Christian versions. It was evidently growing anti- Specimen op a "PALIMPSEST" Manuscript like that o? St. Ephraem. (Notice under the writing the faintly appearing letters of the Old Bible til it h-^d been rubbed out ) ^' ^ ."-'" ll"-".-,.'W. ~ " i;,i*«> h fa. ft' S &" %,.^< «»«i*5^>" %- •*■* ; fe fi r * if *« " 5 «,„ '* ^-»^ r 'i&.y'.i'V'^,-*, 14 '* .S.'/ 'd?.' Photographed from the Dublin University/ I'alimpseit, Codex Z. laSau page is8.] THE SYRIAC BIBLB. 159 qaated even in Ephraem's day (about A.D. 3 50), if we may judge from his comments on the texb He constantly finds it necessary to explain words and phrases that had already become obscure to the people of his time, though, by the way, he very often explains them wrongly. The fact, however, that such explana- tions were needed is most probably an indication of the antiquity of the Syriac text which lay before him, Melito, bishop of Sardis, about the year 170, quotes the reading of this Syriac Bible of a verse in Genesis ; and the great Origen, whom we have mentioned already, and who lived about A.D. 250, tells of a Syriac Bible manuscript in the possession of a poor widow whom he knew. All the other evidence confirms the impression thus left on us as to its date, and scholars are now almost unanimous in placing the Syriac version not later than about the year 150 A.D. m. Letter from the Lord Jesus to a Syrian King. The traditions of the Syrian Church, however, are by no means satisfied with so modem a date for their Bible. One opinion puts the date of the Syriac Old Testament back to the days of Solomon and Hiram, when all the Hebrew books written up to that date were, they say, translated into the Syriac tongue. Another tradition tells that it was translated by the priest, who was sent to Samaria by the Assyrian king (2 Kings xvii. 28); while a third and some- i6o THE SYRIAC BIBLE. what more plausible statement is, that the version belongs to the days ofThaddens the apostle and Abgarus, king of Edessa, the correspondent of our Lord. Have you ever heard, reader, the ancient Church story of the evangelisation of Syria, the letter of King Abgarus written to Jesus Christ, and the answer of our Lord to that Syrian king? The story goes that, moved by the account of Christ's beautiful life, and of His unkind reception by the Jews, and needing also to be healed by Him of a sore disease. King Abgarus sent Him a letter inviting Him to his land, and generously offering to share with Him all that he had. The story was widely believed in the early centuries. It seems a pity we cannot believe it still. On reading the simple, touching letter, one is almost inclined to regret that we live in this clearer, colder age of his- torical doubt and criticism, in which all those beautiful old legends are withering away. Here are the letters as given by Eusebius, the great Church historian in the fourth century. He says he found them in the archives of the library at Edessa, and translated them from their original Syriac tongue : — (EapB of ttje %tiitx tBittten fig Itiitg afigama to JeSUS, anil B«nt to ^I'tn at Sttttaalctn bg anantas tfje ffiourwt. Abgabus, Pbinoe of Edessa, sends greetino to Jksits, the exosllent Savioub who has apfeabeq ON THE B0BDSB8 OF JeBUBALEM. I HAVE HEARD THI EBFOBI8 BESPSOTINQ TBEE, AND ThY CURES AS FEB- THE SYRIAC BIBLE. i6l rOBMED BT ThEB WITHOUT MSDIOINB OR THK USB OV HEBBs. Fob it is said Thou hakest the blikd TO BSE AOAIN, AND THE LAME TO WALE. AND THOU 0LEAN8EST THE LBPEBS, AND THOD OASTEST OUT III- PURE SPIRITS AND DEMONS, AND ThOU HEALEBT THOSB THAT ARE lOBUGNTBD BT LONa DISEASE, AND ThOD BAISEST THE DEAD ; AND HEABINO ALL THESE THINOS OP Thee, I concluded in mt mind one of two THINGS ; either Thou art God, and ha vino de- scended from heaven, doest thbsb things ; OB ELSB, DOING TEEM, THOU ABT THE SON OF OOD. ThEBBFOBE, NOW I HAVE WRITTEN AND BESOUGHT Thee to visit me, and to heal the disease with WHICH I am afflicted. I have beabd also that the Jews hurmub AGAINST Thee, and are plotting to injure Theb. I have, howeveb, a vest small but noblb estate, which is sufficient for us both. JJ^e anstoer of 3esU0 to ISing aiigatna 6g t]&e ffiflurt'et Snantaa. Blessed aet thou, Aboarus, who, without SEEING, HAST BELIEVED IN Me. FOB IT IS WRITTEN OONOERNING Me, THAT THKT WHO HAVE SEEN Mb WILL NOT BELIEVE ; THAI THET WHO HAVE NOT SEEN HAT BELIEVE ASH LIVE. BuT IN BBGABD TO WHAT THOU HAST WRITTEN, THAT I SHOULD COMB TO THEE, IT 18 NECESSARY THAT I SHOULD FULFIL ALL THINGS HERE FOB WHICH I HAVE BEEN SENT, AND AFTER THIS FULFILMENT THUS TO BE BEOBIVED AGAIN BT HiM THAT SENT Me. ANU AFTER I HAVE BEEN REOBIVBD UP, I WILL SEND TO THEB A CERTAIN ONE OF Mt DISCIPLES, THAT HB MAT HEAL THT AFFLICTION, AND OIVB LIFE TO THEB AND THOSE WHO ABB WITH THBE. After these letters, the historian gives the account, which he found subjoined to them in the Syriao i62 THE SYRIAC BIBLE. tongne, of the fulfilment of our Lord's promise after His Ascension, and the proclamation to Syria of the Christian faith. For many centuries it was believed that Edessa had a charmed existence, being imper- vious to all assaults of besiegers through its possession of this divine epistle. IV. Biblical Criticism and the Syriac Bible, At any rate, leaving these old traditions altogether out of account, there is, as we have seen, clear proof of the existence of this Syriac version soon after the year 150. It is, therefore, the earliest of all Chris- tian versions. St. Bphraem teaches us by the words and phrases quoted in his commentary that the Syriac text in our hands to-day is substantially the same as that which he had before him. We find the very same words in our existing Syriac manuscripts. And we have further evidence of this from the fact that soon after his day the Syrian Church split into three hostile sects, hating each other as heartily as did the Jews and Samaritans, but all three nevertheless using to this day the same version of the Scriptures. This indicates clearly that the present Syriac Bible must have been in use before the schisms in the Church, since we cannot believe that after it any one of the three hostile parties would have accepted its Bible from another. SPECIMEN OF SYRIAC. PESaiTO VEK8I0N. oOTO^k.] )cTl^)o . )c?x!^ LQl^ JOOT uOTO^L.) t>t» .; -1 jbOT uOTO^I Ucn . )J^^y> oot |octi uOTor >Ny> . JoOT OTi*)^ "Va . JtriJ:^ La!^ . )2)cn ).iX CTL^ . )oOTj ]0t:» 'Lien )L». ILs) 6(Tio . t_»JLJLi-a'» Ijcnoj ^6crutj| ISJio •> crL5?») |) I^oo-A^o •. icTU-i )J)(S.a;^'»i )j >(ti_cqJj» |Lo>cn,.m N )L) IJot locn OOT |J . cnj^i^ ^ Ki »qT-i ^» 1 N^» wCTio^) . |JCTiQ_i '*^>S jcTLcajj p) . Ijcnci,- . ■ iNoS >cn I ■<>> -• )ji-«» )jcn6-i i-^-^ )b\ xn . jJjOT |><>'\-v->i . )viN>,\ ILIj CTT^c^ . otjSJ: l) |v(Nso . )6cri cnij|^ til •S; 1 1 ^Nq-o ^octl^ ..::iqi^ -. ..rn"^"*"? . oT?iaj~) ^-10.20^ CTV^O) r'^P • vpaoTj JctlSssJ . ); m^} UIj:^: ^ ]io . |.x>« ^ a^« r*^' ^^mO . ^ ,_^o )6cn iJja^ J-t^^^- To face page 162.] THE SYRIAC BIBLE. 163 The great value of this Syriac version consists in the fact that it is a translation direct from the Hebrew, many of the other early versions being second hand, made from the Septuagint translation. And its value is increased owing to its excellence. It comes nearest to our ideal of what a version ought to be. It re- produces its original faithfully, and as far as possible literally, seldom or never relaxing into free paraphrase. Of course, the Hebrew manuscripts underlying it are many centuries earlier than Massoretic days ; many centuries earlier, it may be, even than the days of our Lord.' It has several small variations from the existing Hebrew Bible, sometimes evidently arising from confusion of the " similar letters " or from read- ing the vowels differently from the Massoretes, but in some cases exhibiting quite different and at times apparently better readings than those of the Masso- retic text. Its chief defect for purposes of criticism is due to traces of the influence of the Septuagint upon it. It was almost inevitable that this should be so. The Septuagint was the People's Bible, the Bible used by our Lord and His Apostles, and circulated aU over the Christian Church. It would, therefore, be very likely in process of time to tinge more or less all the Eastern versions of the Old Testament. ' Cbristianx have snmetimes unfairly saspected that th« Jewt, in their opposition to Christianity, may hare tampered with the text oi Meaaianio propheciea. Therefore the importance of the Syriao Bible IB increased by the fact that it was made from a Hebrew Bible whiob •zi«ted before any disputes between Jews and Christians. i64 THE SYRIAC BIBLE. The Syriac, like all the other ancient Bibles, still needs a great deal of revision before it can become a satisfactory instrument in the work of Biblical criticism. But there is ample store of material for the purpose. The Vatican and other great Continental libraries possess several important copies ; and nearer hand, in the galleries of the British Museum is a richer collec- tion than any, including the famous library treasures of the Monastery of St. Mary, Mother of God, from the Nitrian deserts in Egypt. So there is only want- ing — and they are already conung forward — a band of earnest scholars to work at these old manuscripts, and give to the world a Syriac Bible worthy of its ancient history. DOCUMENT No. VI. THB "VULOATB" OP ST. JEROME. I. The Monk of Bethlehem. Towards the end of the fourth century so many variations had crept into the Old Latin Bibles that the need of some kind of revision began to be very keenly felt by every one who had the opportunity of comparing two of them together. There were almost as many different "editions," it was said, "as there were copies." Just at this crisis, when the leaders of the Latin- speaking Churches were casting about for some one to help them, there returned to Rome from his Beth- lehem monastery one of the greatest Biblical scholars of his day, Busebius Hieronymus, better known to us as St. Jerome, and his high reputation pointed him out at once as the very man for this important work. Jerome was not very willing at first to undertake it. It is a thankless task, he said, and will only arouse bitter prejudice amongst those " who think that igno- rance and holiness are one and the same." However, he was persuaded to attempt it, amid much advice tQ be very tender of the prejudices of the " weak i66 THE "VULGATE' OP ST JEROME. brothers," whose consciences were bo sensitiYe about meddling with the Scriptares, and he finished a rather cautions revision of the New Testament about the year 385. Then he began a Kevised Version of the Psalms, correcting the current Psalters by means not of the original Hebrew, but of those Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachns, and Theodotion which we have just described. After this he went through a number of the Old Testament books, with a good deal of murmuring from his clerical friends that he was going too far with his changes in the Bible, and a good deal of dissatisfaction in his own mind that he was not going half as far as he ought to. At last he grew tired of this cautious patching of old versions, which no amount of patching could mend, and so he determined on the bold stroke of going back to the foantain-head and translating the Old Testament direct from the original Hebrew manuscripts. It was a very serious undertaking, and no other scholar in the Church of those days would have been competent to attempt it. But Jerome was a man of great resources. He was a most industrious and ener- getic worker, and an able and accomplished scholar. He was no novice in the task of translating ; he had learned his Hebrew from the Palestine Babbis ; he had teachers from the College of Tiberias privately assisting him ; he had access to Hebrew manuscripts probably centuries older than the time of our Lord. And, therefore, though he had many obstacles in hia way ; though his Hebrew scholarship was by no means SCRAP OF AN " OLD LATIN " manuscript, the version WHOSE MISTAKES LED TO THE MAKING OF ST. JEROME'S vui-GATE (see p. 170), fspii,- ■*-^i:»'* "5^- ^y^ '-'""'fx^.^ if<^Tita 1 »*»*^ .,..v ***<( V**„ i, /, Photographed from Manuscript of Archbishop Ussher's, now in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. To face page 166.] THE " VULOATB" OP ST. JEROME. i6y perfect ; though there were no rowels in his Hebrew manuscripts to assist him in finding the meaning; though the fierce popular prejudice against changes considerably hampered the freedom of his work, he produced the most valuable translation of the Bible that has ever been made before modern days. No other work has had such an influence on the history of the Bible. For more than a thousand years it was the parent of every version of the Scriptures in Western Europe ; and even now, when the original Greek and Hebrew manuscripts are so easily accessible, the Bhemish and Douay Testaments are translations from this famous " Vulgate " Bible of St Jerome, so are also our own Prayer Book Psalms, and the " Com- fortable Words " in the Communion Office, while even in the Authorised Yetsion of the Bible its influence is quite perceptible. n. The "Temper of a Saint." Such a howl of indignation as this new Bible ex- cited ! ^ Eemembering the prejudice which our recent English Revised Bible excited a few years ago, it is instructive to recall the story how the work of the old monk of Bethlehem was received. It was called re> volutionary and heretical; it was pronounced subversive of all faith in Holy Scripture ; it was an impious tam- pering with the inspired Word of Gk)d; in fact, for i68 THE " VULOATE" OP ST. JEROMR. centuries afterwards it was rejected and condemned, and everything was said that ignorant bigotry oonld suggest to bring it into disrepute. What a lesson on the evils of senseless prejudice ! What an instance, too, of a brave, honest man determined to follow fear- lessly what he felt to be right, even though the whole world were against him ! Even his greatest friends and admirers were swayed by the popular cry. St. Augustine, who was scholar enough to understand the merits of the work, and who had in the beginning praised and congratulated him, got frightened at the last. He begged him to let it alone. He told him the story of an old bishop in Africa, who used his (St. Jerome's) new - fangled translation; how one day, in reading the Lesson in Church, he read the word " ivy " instead of " gourd," in the story of Jonah, when the people started up in wild excitement, and refused to be quiet till they got thdr old Bible back. Poor St. Jerome ! it was a hard time for him, and his letters in existence tell how keenly he felt it. Unfortunately, too, whatever his other qualifications for the title, the old man had certainly not the "temper of a saint," and he slashed out bitterly against the "fools," the "stupids," the "two-legged donkeys " (bipedes aselloi), whose prejudices had raised such an outcry against him. It is hard to blame him. It is a sad story to look back upon — a brave man wearing out his life in one of the grandest works ever accomplished for the Church, and seeing this THE " VULGATE" OP ST. JEROME. 169 work of his by ignorant bigotry banned and pro- scribed to his dying day ! It was long after his death before its value was recognised. Pope Gregory the Great first set the fashion by using it in his Commentary on the Book of Job, and it is almost amusing to see how com- pletely the tide had turned at the time of the Council of Trent, when the injured old scholar had been a thousand years dead. Men had then grown as attached to the Vulgate of St. Jerome as those of the fourth century had been to its predeoessors. In fact, they seem almost to have forgotten that it was only a translation. When errors were pointed out, they quite resented the idea of correcting it by means of the old Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. "It is the version of the Church," said they, "and in the language of the Church. Why should it yield to old Greek and Hebrew manuscripts which have been in the hands of schismatics and unbelievers for hun- dreds of years?" So these wise scholars invented an easy method of textual criticism for themselves. Instead of going to the trouble of comparing the version with the ancient manuscripts, they settled the matter by calmly decreeing in Council that the old Vulgate should be received as " authentic," what- ever that may mean, and that it should be the stan- dard version, to which appeal must be made in all matters of controversy. An interesting exhibition of the feeling at the time is a passage in the preface to the great Cotuplutensian Polyglot Bible, where the I70 THB " VULGATE" OP ST. JEROME. Hebrew and the Greek and the Latin Vulgate were printed in parallel columns, side by side, the venerable old Vulgate being in the middle, which the editors, with grim humour, compared to the position of our Lord between the two thieves ! m. Papal Infallibility and Biblical Criticism. We have seen now that for centuries after St. Jerome the Vulgate had been banned and suspected ; indeed, men had often presumed to "correct" it, so as to make it agree with the corrupt Old Latin Bible, which held the place of honour. The reader will therefore see reason to believe that by the time of the Council of Trent its copies had probably got into a state very much needing the exercise of intelligent textual criticism. The Council, as we have seen, contented themselves by declaring it " authentic," and decreeing that "hereafter the sacred Scripture, and especially this ancient Vulgate edition, should be printed as accurately as possible." About forty years after, Pope Srxtus V. undertook to bring out a correct edition. His method was a very simple one indeed. He got together a company of learned revisers, but with this understanding, that their functions were merely to collect manuscripts and prepare the evidence for and against certain readings in the text, after which the Pope himself, by reason not of his scholarship, but of his gift of infallibility. THB "VULQATB" OF ST. JEROMB. 171 decided straiglit off which were the genuine words ! Then it occurred to him that it would be a good thing for the credit of hia new edition if he forbade the collecting of any further critical materials, lest the authority of this sacred work should be undermined. He decreed also that all readings varying from his edition should be rejected as incorrect ; that it should never be altered in the slightest degree, under pain of the anger of Almighty God and His blessed apostles Peter and Paul ; and if any man presumed to trans- gress this mandate, he was to be placed under the ban of the major excommunication, not to be absolved except by the Pope himself! But alas for "the best laid plans of mice and men " ! Scholars who examined the new book very soon learned, if they did not know it before, that, as there was no royal road to learning, so was there also no papal road to criticism. The book was full of- mis- takes. The scholarship of Sixtus was by no means great, and his infallibility somehow failed to make up for this defect. The position was a very awkward one, and though things were kept quiet during the life of the Pope, as soon as he was dead it was strongly felt that his Vulgate would bring discredit and peril on the Church. At any cost, a new edition must be prepared to supersede the " infallible " one. But the credit of the deceased Pope must somehow be saved as well. How was this to be done ? I am afraid the Jesuits of that day do not come out of the matter with very clean hands. Only one way 172 THE "VULGATE" OF ST. JEROME. seemed open to them, and they adopted it, "The mistakes were all owing to the fault of the printer ! " Not that they descended to a deliberate nntrnth. Dr. Salmon, in his recent book on "Infallibility," points out the delightfiil equivocation with which they salved their conscience. " Either the printers were to blame, or $omebody dse," said they. But in the preface to the new edition brought out under Pope Clement VIII. the " somebody else " was left out altogether, and the whole blame of the Papal blunders was saddled on the unfortunate printer. IV. The Value of the Vulgate. This new edition, the Clementine Vulgate, was a considerable improvement on its predecessor, but was very far from being a faultless work. Indeed, a satis- factory edition of the Vulgate now may almost be regarded as an impossibility. So many causes have united to corrupt it, that it is one of the hardest prob- lems in textual criticism to restore the original " Bible of St. Jerome." But it is well worth doing all that can be done in this direction by means of the available ancient sources. The document is a most important one. It is a witness of the Hebrew text at a very early period, for Jerome had probably manuscripts before him of an THE " VULOATB- OP ST. JEROME. 173 earlier date than the days of our Lord. And it must be remembered, too, that, like the Syriac, the Vulgate Old Testament is a translation direct from the Hebrew ;' not, like many other Christian versions, a steoond-hand translation from the Septuagint Greek. Therefore, it is worthy of much more pains than are being spent on it by Biblical scholars, and, even in its present faulty state, is a most valuable aid in the criticism of the Hebrew text. 1 This is not true of th« whol* work. The Book of Fnalma and a few of the apocryphal booka were not translated from the original Hebrew, bnt were taken from the old Latin Bible, lUghtly revised b; St. Jerome. Soot^ ££i. THE NEW BIBLE. A ■paoiiinf or TEXTUAL CKITICISM. BOOK III. CRITICS AT WORK. L Introductory. " The Old Testament is sitting, sir ! * It called np rather absurdly reminiscencefl of the poultry-yard, this statement with which a pompous official barred the entrance to the Jerusalem Chamber to some visitors of our acquaintance daring the recent revision days. The information really conveyed was that behind those closed doors the Biblical critics of the Revision Company were working at the materials accessible to them for producing a correct version of the Old Testament, and the visitors must retire with- out gratifying their curiosity about either the historic chamber or the work of the revisers. I trust the reader's interest has been by this time sufficiently aroused to make him share their curiosity in the latter particular, for a glance at the work in the Jerusalem Chamber would be a most valuable illustration of our " Lesson in Biblical Criticism." We have already roughly examined the accessible material — ^the " Old Hebrew Documents " and the " Other Old Ddouments" described in the preceding pages. W« 178 CRITICS AT WORK. hare still to learn the method of asing this material in producing a correct Bible, and the easiest way of doing so is by watching how it was used by the scholars of the Old Testament revision. The reader will, of course, quite understand that this is not a book about the Revised or any other par- ticular version. We merely desire to glance here at the recent revision, as the most convenient specimen accessible for our purpose. Let us therefore, in fancy, put aside the burly janitor from the doorway and view for a brief moment the " Old Testament sitting." n. "The Old Testament Sitting." An ancient chamber, grand with historic memories, lined round with cedar and with curious tapestry — a long table running down the centre — a band of men busily intent on the written and printed sheets that lie spread out before them — a heavy face and mono- tonous voice arguing as to the value of a verse in the Septuagint which differs considerably from the Hebrew under discussion. That is all. Nothing that seems very romantic or interesting about it. Does it differ from the scene which the reader expected ? Is he looking round him for the beautiful gold and purple Psalters, or the rough, worn edges of old copies of the Law ? Have I misled him, by the previous descriptions of the material, to imagine the floor piled with faded parchments from CRITICS AT WORK. 179 the arohires of the East, and bishops and deans and reverend professors grabbing in the mouldering dirt of the old manuscripts, hurrying about from one docu- ment to another to investigate the evidence about the passages in question P Comfort yourself, my reader. The parchments and the dirt are safe in their repositories all over the different libraries of Europe. The dirty work has been already done. For a hundred years past patient scholars have been toiling in many lands over the masses of ancient Biblical lore, and the results of their toil appear in the clean and carefully prepared sheets that lie on the revisers' table. Beside each column of the Hebrew are accurate annotations, tell- ing of every important variation that has been dis- covered, whether in some of the Massoretic manu- scripts, or in the Samaritan, or in certain copies of the Septuagint, or in the Syriac or Vulgate versions. If the Talmud or Targums, or any of the mediaeval Jewish commentators, or any other authorities, have light to throw on a passage, their information too is carefully recorded. So that, it will be seen, the evidence for or against any particular reading is manifest at a glance. m. Defects of our Specimen. Before proceeding to examine the work of the Old Testament revisers, it is necessary to remark that, though the most convenient specimen, it is by no i8o CRITICS AT WORK. means a good speoimen for teaching how the various " Old Documents " ought to be used in producing a correct Bible. There are defects both in the material used and in the restrictions placed upon themselves hj those who used them, which seriously hinder it from being a good illustration of the processes of Biblical criticism. Partly perhaps from unwillingness to run counter to popular prejudices, but chiefly from difficulties con- nected with the state of the manuscripts, the revisers bound themselves to a close adherence to the Mas- soretic Hebrew Text. Now, however they might otherwise differ about their work, they all knew very well that this text was in many places of questionable integrity. Though, on the whole, it is safe to regard it as correct, though in the Pentateuch it reaches almost perfect accuracy, yet there were parts, especially the historical books, in which every scholar knew of superficial flaws and mistakes, some of which, too, were not very difficult of correction. But, except in rare cases, these flaws and mistakes had to be allowed to remain ; the revisers considered that, in the present state of our knowledge on the subject, it was best to adhere to the standard Massoretic text. A good deal of blame has been attached to them for this " want of boldness " in accomplishing their work. It has been pointed out that the most ancient Massoretic manuscript is scarcely a thousand years old; that the Septuagint and other ancient versions take us back much nearer to Old Testament CRITICS AT WORK. ,8i times; tbat they often give readings which quite solve difiSculties in the Hebrew text, and have every appearance of being more correct ; that sometimes it is easy to prove from their translation that the mia- take must be in the Hebrew, and to see exactly the copyist's slip which gave rise to the mistake. And all this is true. The Eevised Old Testament is decidedly behind the scholarship of the age. The work is a timid and cautious one. There is little doubt that the next revision, whenever it takes place, will be bolder and freer, and that the ancient versions, especially the Septuagint, will play a larger part in the work. Yet, in spite of all this, we believe that the revisers were fully justified in their cautious procedure. For, in the first place, as we have seen already, there is every reason to believe that the existing Hebrew manuscripts, late though they be, difier but very slightly from those in use at the time of our Lord, and probably centuries earlier. The most important of their flaws and defects are of very ancient times, before any critical study of the manuscripts had begun, and before any of the versions, except perhaps the Septuagint, had been made. And, in the second place, it must be remembered that the versions, the only means of correcting the Hebrew, are at present in a most unsatisfactory state. The difierent copies of the Septuagint vary consider- ably from each other, and this too is the case with the other old versions. Therefore there is much to be said for the revisera' i82 CRITICS AT WORK. explanation that the time is not yet ripe, that " onr knowledge at present is not sufficient to justify an attempt at a reoonstr action of the text by means of the Ancient Versions." The fact is, we were not ready for an Old Testament revision at all in this present century. The amount of necessary prepara- tion work is simply enormous. We want a band of scholarly specialists to spend years in collecting and comparing the copies of the Septuagint, and by means of their critical wisdom to find out as nearly as pos- sible what the old scholars of King Ptolemy really wrote down two thousand years ago. The same thing is needed for every one of the old versions, as fer as it is possible to do it for them now. The Hebrew manuscripts themselves also need a good deal of careful study. We must wait for all this to be accomplished. And we must wait, too — we shall not have long to wait — for the growth of a spirit of common sense in the public, whose prejudices have so much to do with rendering any new version a failure or a success. Our " Bible-loving people " must learn to aspire a little higher than the " rhythm " and " music " and " old associations," whose disturbance, I remember, was the chief burden of their criticism in the days of the late revision. They must get beyond this sentimental pietism, and see that, if necessary, all things else must be sacrificed to the one supreme object of making the Bible mean to us exactly what it meant to its original readera CRITICS AT WORK. 183 All these things will take time. On the whole, it may be safely asserted that for another half-centaiy at least the time will not be ripe for a successfnl Old Testament revision. IV. Nineteenth Century Massoretes. Under these circumstances, the revisers adopted a safe middle coarse. In cases of evident mistakes in the "Old Hebrew Documents," or of very plausible readings in the " Other Old Documents," they acted as did the old Massoretio revisers long ago — merely give the correction a place in the margin, only in very rare cases indeed making changes in the text. The reader will easily understand that the circumstances which necessitated this cautious procedure must considerably lessen the value of the Old Testament revision for our purpose as an illustration of Biblical criticism. For a good illustration it would be requisite that the " Hebrew Documents " should be freely open to correction, and that the " Other Old Documents," the instruments of that correction, should be in proper condition for accomplishing their task. However, by carefully selecting our specimens for examination, we shall probably make it answer suffi- ciently for our purpose. CHAPTER II. SPECIMENS OF CRITICAL WORK. I. " Adthobiskd " Rkadinq. Reviseks' Rkadino. 6en. iv. 8 : And Gain talked And Cain told Abel his brother ; with Abel his brother : and it and it came to pass, &c. came to pass, when they were in iu c u i.u i n • • i. Marginal Reaoinq. the neld, that Cam rose up agamat .,.,., . , . . , . Hebrew means, Cain said unto Abel Abel hia brother, and slew him. ^^ brother; and many ancient .u- thoritlos have, "said unto Abel his brother, Let us go into the field." The Hebrew verb here means regularly said to, and when we meet it we always expect to find after it the words that were said. But there are no such words following it in the Hebrew text. Therefore, the translators of our Authorised Version saved the sense at the cost of the grammar, and incorrectly translated it talked with." The revisers have made a partial compromise — " Cain told Abel." The words literally translated would be : — And Cain SAID TO Abel his brother: and it came to pass when they were in the field that Gain rose up, &o. SPBCIMBNS OP CRITICAL WORK. 185 One is therefore inclined to suspect that the line containing the words which Cain said may have been lost out of the text by the slip of some copyist. They certainly do not occur in the " Old Hebrew Documents." In this diflScnlty the revisers turned to the " Other Old Documents " to find out how they read the verse. First the Samaritan Pentateuch was called as a wit- ness, and it read : — And Gain SAID TO Abel his brother, Let vs go into the field. a.nd it came to pass, when they weke in the field, that Cain rose up, &c. This seemed a very likely reading. But then the Samaritan witness was not of too respectable a char- acter. It had before been convicted of altering pas- sages to make them read more smoothly and easily. Its evidence, therefore, could not be accepted without confirmation. Then they tried the Septuagint, which read just the same. The Syriac (Peshitto) was called, and then St. Jerome's old Vulgate, and last of all the two Jerusalem Targums, and they all persisted in inserting the words, " Let us go into the field." There is a passage in i Sam. xx. 1 1 which also rather favours this insertion : " And Jonathan said unto David, Come, let us go into the field. And they went out both of them into the field," i86 SPECIMENS OP CRITICAL WORK. It was argned in defence of the Hebrew reading, that the difficulty about the meaning of the verb might have made the other documents fill up the sense by inserting these words ; while the Hebrew scribes were so scrupulous about the letter of the text that they would not meddle with it on any consideration. This may have been so, but the evidence seems very strong against it. I think, from the tone of the revisers' marginal note, that they were very much inclined to admit the disputed words into the text; and though now they must remain out in the cold for the present, their chances of admission are decidedly promising whenever the next Old Testament revision takes place. n. "AOTHOBIBBD" ReADINO. RkVIBEBb' RkADINO. Gen. xlix. 6 : In their self-will la their self-will they houghed they digged down a wall. an ox. It is hard to say which of these is the right reading. The Hebrew might mean either, according to the vowels supplied. HQRU SHE might be read h^qbu SHyR, " they digged down a wall ; " or HjQ,rd BnjR, " they houghed an ox." The Septuagint has the latter translation, and it seems to allude to the spirit of destructiveness manifested (Compare 2 Sam. viiL 4) ; but most of the other ve> aions have the reading of tho " Authorised YersicD '' SPECIMENS OF CRITICAL WORK. 187 m. " AUTHOSISKD " ReADINO. RETIBEBd' RsADnro. JoBH. ix. 4 : The Gibeonites The Oibeonitea went • and -made'SB-if- they -had- took-them-proviaioni. been-ambaasadon. There is this improbability against the "Authorised" reading, that one does not quite see why the Gibeonitea need pretend to be what they really were. That they "took them provisions," which is the reading in the Septnagint and of nearly all the ancient versions, fits in very well with their statement in verse 12:" This bread which we took for provisions," &c. The mistake, on whichever side it exists, is simply the confusion of oar two mischievons old acquaintances, T and 1, d and r. Here are the two words : — (i.) 1"l''t02Jn =z Hitztayaru =1 acted-as-ambassadors. (2.) V]''D2Jri = Hitztayatiu = took-them-provisions. The first is the reading of nearly all the Massoretio manuscripts. Either the second was the word in the ancient Hebrew manuscripts which the Septuagint and other translators worked from, or else they mistook the other word for it. Who can tell which is right ? The reader is now almost in as good a position to decide the question as were the revisers in the Jernsalem Chamber. i88 SPECIMENS OF CRITICAL WORK. IV. "Adthoeiskd" Readinq. Revisibs' Readino., Ji7na!SxTiii.3o: AndJouatban, And Jonathan, the son of Ger- the eon of Grershom, the eon of shorn, the son of Mos£s, he and Hahaseeh, he and his sons were his sons were priests, priests (to the Danites' idol). Here is a curious case of tampering with the Hebrew text such as the MasBoretee would never have dared to attempt. It was done a thousand years before their day. The Hebrew Bible, following the best manu- scripts, has the word written thus, M'SH, the w being what is called " suspended." The name, therefore, is read as Mnsh (Manasseh) ; though, if the little suspended N were removed, it would be MsH = Mosheh (Moses). Clearly " MosES " is the true reading, for Gershom was the son of Moses, not of Manasseh, and Jonathan is expressly stated to be a Levite, not a Manassite. So far the evidence of the " Old Hebrew Documents.'' Now let us see what the " Other Old Documents " have to say. The reading " Manasseh " appears in the Septuagint, and therefore must have been in the Hebrew manuscripts used by the famous " Seventy Translators." It is found also in the Syriac, and indeed in all the important versions with the excep- tion of the Vulgate. St. Jerome's old Rabbis must have taught him that it was wrong. It is clearly a reading of very ancient times. But in spite of all its supporters and all its antiquity, the reader will easily see that it needs to be corrected. SPECIMENS OP CRITICAL WORK. 189 There was probably not the least iatention amongst the Jews of falsifying the text in this place. They scmpalonsly kept the N small and suspended, and had a note in the margin calling attention to it It was only that they hated to hear the name of Moses read in such a connection, and so, to spare their feelings, they pronounced it as Manasseh.^ The Talmud has a note accounting for the reading : — " Ger- sbom is called the son of Manasseh. Was he not the son of Moses ? For it is written, The sons of Moees were Gershom and Eliezer. Bnt because he did the works of Manasseh the idolater, the Scripture hangs him on to the family of Manasseh." And Bashi, the Jewish commentator mentioned already, tells us, "For the honour of Moses N was written, but it was suspended to indicate that it was not Manasseh, but Moses." V. "AcTHORiaBD" Readino. Rkvisebs' Maboin. I Sam. xiii. I : Saul reigned Saul was (thirty) years old when one year, and when he had reigned he began to reign, and he reigned two years over Israel, two years over Israel. Beyond all question the Hebrew Bible is here corrupt. The usual formula for stating a king's age at his accession and his length of reign is : — " was years old when he began to reign, cmd he ' With the same object tfcey substituted hoshcth for Baal in proper names, Ishbosheth {or Esbbaal, Mephiboshelh for Meribaal, Jembesheth for Jerubaal, &c., to avoid pronouncing the aoonrsed aame. 190 SPBCTMBNS OF CRITICAL WORK. reigned years." For example, 3 Sam. ii 10: " Ishbosheth was forty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned two years." 2 Sam. v. 4 : " David was thirty years old when he began to rei^n, and he reigned forty years ; " and bo frequently in the Books of Kings. Now, this is the formula used above, and it cannot be rightly rendered, as in our Bibles, " Saul reigned one year ; " it should read, according to the Hebrew, " Saul was one year old," which is clearly a mistake. Probably the scribe, in writing the formula, left the numerals blank, to be afterwards filled in, and thus the mistake arose. The Septuagint does not help us much. Some of its later editions have the word thirty, as above, but the best MSS. leave out the verse. It is very likely that in the ancient and leas scrupulous days some scribe thought this a con* venient place for inserting in his manuscript the usual information about the king's age and reign. All we can say now is, that this verse is corrupt, and we cannot tell what the true reading should be. VI. "AnTHOBisED" Rbadino. Revibebs' Maegin. I Sah. xiv. 18 : And Saul said The Septuagiut baa — unto Abiah, Bring hither the ABE Bring hither the EFEOD ; for he of God. For the ark of God was wore the ephod at that time before at that time with the children of Israel, Israel. The Septuagint here is very probably right, though the revisers have left the text uncorrected. Let the SPECIMENS OP CRITICAL WORK. igi reader judge for himBelf. Here are the chief ooii- siderafcions that influenced them in admitting into their margin the Septuagint reading : — (l.) The ark was, most probably, not there at all at the time, but at Kirjath-jearim (i Sam. vii. I, 2), where it remained from its capture by the Philistines until David removed it. (2.) The ark would have been of no use for Saul's purpose. He wanted to ascertain the Divine will, and it was the ephod, not the ark, that was the instru- ment for doing so. (3.) The words, "Bring hither the ark," are never used. The Hebrew verb here is suitable only to the bringing of smaller objects. Bring hither the ephod is a usual expression (see chap, xxiii. 9 ; xxx. 7). (4.) Moreover, the words, withdraw thine hand, i.e., desist, would not be appropriate if he were ordering Ahiah to get ready the ark to be carried out to battle. (5.) The mistake of ark for ephod might easily take place. Here are the words — ]nN = Ark. ^1^^4 = Ephod. Besides, too, it was noticed that, though the present authorised reading seems so smooth in English, in the original Hebrew it is defective and ungrammaticaL Thus, " The ark was that day and (not with) the children of Israel." 192 SPECIMENS OF CRITICAL WORK. On the whole, I think the reader will see that it is extremely probable, to say the least, that the Septua- gint preserves for us the correct reading which was in the very ancient Hebrew manuscripts, and that onr Massoretic manuscripts in this instance are corrupt. vn. The Story of David and Goliath (i Sam. xvii.,xviii.)k The revisers have rightly noted in the margin of I Sam. xvii. I2 that the episodes immediately before and after the combat with the giant (i.e., vers. 12—31 and ver. 55, &c.) are omitted in the Septuagint. It was objected by some that this note was not justified, because that the famous Alexandrian manuscript of the Septuagint does not omit these parts. This is quite true, but on examining that manuscript it is found to be almost a stronger proof than if it had made the omis- sion. Clearly the scribe who wrote it was accustomed to a manuscript which omitted these disputed parts. For immediately after finishing ver. 1 1 he begins the first words of ver. 32, as if they were the words immediately following, and then suddenly stops and proceeds to incorporate the missing section. But he does not score out the words of ver. 3 2 which he had begun, and so the traces of his correcting himself remain clear in the manuscript for 1 500 years. Most probably he remembered just then, or some- body pointed out to him, that the Hebrew manuscripts SPECIMENS OF CRITICAL WORK. 193 contained this other section, and so he decided that it ought to be in the text in that place. Ought it ? How well I remember as a boy the difficulties which this story presented to me as it stands in our English Bible ! Has it not often seemed strange to you, reader ? Just before, we are told how David was introduced to the court of Saul, and became a prime favourite with the king, and was made his armour-bearer. Yet here he is represented as back amongst the sheep-folds, sent by his father to his brethren, treated by these brethren with a sharpness Buch as kings' favourites are certainly not often sub- jected to. Nay, we find that he is altogether unknown at court. The king has to inquire of Abner, who is unable to answer him, " Whose son is this youth ? " All this is very puzzling. Strike out the passages omitted by the Septuagint and all follows smoothly. Ver. 32 follows quite naturally after ver. 11, and xviii. 6 after xvii. 54. The story is then perfectly consistent. Nay, more. The Hebrew text shows some traces of having been pieced together at ver. 1 2, and it will be seen, too, that the omitted passages when put together form in themselves a complete story. It looks very like, indeed, as if the Septuagint were right, and that these passages had become inserted in the Hebrew text out of some other written account of the story, or else that they have got out of their proper place in the book. And yet it may well be retorted, as it ofben has been, that the Septuagint translators, not feeling their 194 SPECIMENS OF CRITICAL WORK. responsibility about the text as the Palestine Jews did, were not at all above striking out passages which presented difficulties to their minds. It may be so. Certainly if it were in the Pentateuch it was asserted that this serious interpolation had occurred we should be very slow to believe it except on the most indis- putable evidence. But in the early ages the manu- script of the Book of Samuel, which was used more for private circulation, and never regarded with the same high degree of reverence as were the Books of Moses, might quite possibly have had this disputed part inserted between its leaves by some private owner, and thus become the source of an error such as this. At any rate, in the present state of the evidence the revisers would not be justified in altering the text. viu. 2 Sau. zxi. 19 : And Elhanan, the ion of Jaare-Oregim, a Beth- lemite, Blew Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver's beam. Poor Goliath the Gittite ! Surely we all thought that, if we knew anything of Hebrew history, we knew even from nursery days that he had been pretty well killed already by David himself, when he drew the giant's sword " and slew him, and cut off his head therewith." Of course, we at once suspect some corruption. But how are we to hunt it down ? Fortunately there is a SPECIMENS OP CRITICAL WORK. 195 parallel history, i Ohron. xx., evidently copied from the same source, and corresponding word for word, except that it tells that Elhanan, the son of Jaar, " slew Lah/mi, the brotfter of Goliath." How are these two statements to be accounted for ? — Jaar the Bethlemite slew Goliath. Jaab slew Lahmi, the brother Of Goliath. At the sound of the word l^hmi the Hebrew scholar at once pricks up his ears. He knows that this word, being in what we should call the objective or accusative case, will have in Hebrew the sign of that case, the particle ETH, before it ; thus etH'-lhmi. Immediately he jumps to the conclusion that the word bthlhmi (the Bethlemite), in the other passage, is a mistake for ethlhmi. Thus set on the track, he sees how easily the word " brother " might have become lost or confused in the text. Bth-Goliath is nX-GOLIATH. Brother of Goliath is ipx-Goliath. If the lines be placed directly under each otheir, the reader will see at once how easily a copyist might make the mistake : — Ethlhmi >nX-QoLiATH = (slew) eth-i,.hmi, bbother op Goliath. BiHLHMi /1i4-GoLiATH= Bethlemite (slew) Goliath. 196 SPECIMENS OF CRITICAL WORK. IX. "AnTHOBisED" Reading. Revtbers' READiira. 2 Sah. XV. 28 : I will tarry in I will tarry at the fords of the the plain of the wilderneBB, wildemesB. The reader will remember what has been said (p. 97) about the Massoretic marginal notes, the Keri and Kethibh. This is an illustration. The text has "Habaroth" (fords), the Keri (note in the margin) says, " read Haraboth " (plains). It also interestingly exhibits a very common form of transcriber's mistake. The writer, raising his eyes to the copy before him, repeats to himself the word " Haraboth," and then, before he has half-written it, it gets confused in his mind with Habaroth, which is so very like it in sound and appearance. It is very hard to say which is right. The Kethibh, "fords," looks the most suitable to the context (see chap. xvii. 1 6) ; yet all the ancient versions support the Keri. " ACTHOHIBED " ReaDINQ. ReVISERS' RkADINO. 2 Sam. xviii. 13 : Wrought false- Dealt falsely against his life, hood against mine own life. Here is another of the Keri notes. The text has Naphsho (his Hfe), but the Massoretic note in the margin says, " Read Naphshi " (my life). As already pointed out, we cannot place much dependence on SPECIMENS OF CRITICAL WORK. 197 these notes of the Massorah scribes. We have to use our judgment and the ancient versions in deciding between the reading of the text and the margin. Here the evidence of the versions is too conflicting to help us. " AuxHOBissD " Readino. Revissbs' Mabqin. I Kmosxiii. 12, 13: The father The father eaid unto them, gaid unto them, Which way went Which way went hel And his he! Now, his sons had seen sons shewed him which way the which way the man of God went, man of God went. And he said And he said unto his sons, Saddle unto his sons, Saddle me the ass. me the ass. Now, reader, which of these two readings seems to you the more probable ? Is it not beyond question the second ? The father asks which way, the sons shew him, and immediately he commands, " Saddle me the ass." But, as has been already pointed out, it is a dan- gerous thing to decide by our notions of probability. Let us see what other considerations besides decided the revisers. Hebrew verbs have what we may call a causa- tive voice. Thus here the verb to see, when in this causative voice, would mean to cause to see, i.e., to shew. To see and to shew, then, are parts of the same verb, and are to be distinguished only by a slight difference in the vowels. Therefore, a confusion might easily arise between — YiBU = his sons had seen. Y.RU :- his sons shewed hvm. 198 SPECIMENS OP CRITICAL WORK. So when this alternative reading was proposed at the revision, the first inquiry was, What does the old Septuagint say ? And on examination it was ©und that it read "they shelved," indicating that that was how the translators read this (vowelless) word in the ' ancient Hebrew manuscripts used in the making of it. This, together with the plausibleness of the reading, was a strong point in its favour. Next the Vulgate was questioned, then the Syriac, and finally the Targums, and all persisted in reading with the Sep- tuagint, "his sons shewed him." It was argued, however, on the contrary side, that the Vulgate and Syriac, though translations direct from the ancient Hebrew, might have been influenced in the course of centuries by the all-powerful Septua- gint, and therefore, perhaps, should not count as addi- tional witnesses. In any case, it was said, the Hebrew gives a good and fairly probable sense, which, without greater reason, ought not to be disturbed. Finally the question came to the vote, and since a majority of two-thirds was requisite for any change in the text, the new reading had to content itself with a place in the margin. ZII. ■' AtTTHOStSED '' BlADIKO. RbTISSBS' RBAOntO. , I Chbob. Ti. 28 : A.nd the aona And the bods of Samuel ; the of Samuel ; the first-born Vaabni, first-born (Joel), and the second and Abiah. Abiab. This correction was certainly needed, and it ia a curious instance of how mistakes arise. SPECIMENS OF CRITICAL WORK. 199 We learn from i Sam. viii. 2 that the first-bom of Samuel was Joel, and the second Abiah ; and the 33 rd verse of this chapter speaks also of Joel, the son of Samuel. Therefore the name Vashni, as the first-born, in the above verse, has always been rather a puzzle, and the only explanation was that offered in the mar- gin of our Authorised Version, that Vashni must have been another name for Joel. To the English reader this may seem a fairly plausible explanation; but let him take this short Hebrew lesson before making up hia mind : — V is the Hebrew conjunction " and." 8HNI means " the second." Therefore vshki = " and the second." Now, the Hebrew manuscripts read thus : — And the bonb or Sauusl i.e., And thb bons or Samubl THU riBBIBOBN VBHHI ABIAH. . . . TBI FIBSTBOBN, AHS THI BEcoHi) Abiah. After reading the name Joel in the other passages as the first-born, does it n,ot at once occur to the reader to suspect that the word Joel has by some accidental slip of a copyist dropped out of the text, and that the copyist consequently, puzzled by the Hebrew word vshni (" and the second "), where no first had been mentioned, has vocalised it as a proper name, V.SHNi, as though it were the name of Samuel's firpt-born ? Supply the word Joel in the blank space above, and the whole difficulty disappears. 200 SPECIMENS OF CRITICAL WORK. This is one of those extremely rare cases where we seem compelled to go against all the Old Documents. The blunder is more than two thousand years old. It was even in the ancient Hebrew manuscripts from which the Septuagint translators worked two thousand years ago, and they, of course, transferred it to their version, where it exists to this day. The Syriac is the only important version which corrects it. xm. Ps. xxii. 1 6 : They pierced my hands and my feet. Here is a very remarkable case where the Hebrew text has been entirely deserted in our English Bibles for the preferable reading of the versions. We saw in Bk. i. p. i6 how mistakes might arise from the confusion of the two similar letters ' and 1 (y and u). Here is a case in point. The Hebrew in this famous passage makes no sense as it stands. The word translated " they pierced " is not even a verb at all. It is a noun, ari (HN), " a lion," with a preposition k' (O) prefixed, so that it reads K4AEI (nN3), " like a lion." " Like a lion my hands and my feet " is clearly sheer nonsense. But if the little ' at the end be lengthened to 1, it becomes the Hebrew verb K,ABU (IIND), "they pierced." Therefore, of course, there can be no doubt that this is the right reading, and SPECIMENS OF CRITICAL WORK. 201 that a mistake has arisen owing to confusion of two similar letters. However, to make assurance doubly sure the Ancient Versions were consulted. The Septuagint reads, " They pierced;" the Syriac and the Vulgate read the same ; and the other versions all practically confirm it, though some of them read a slightly different word. This being one of the prominent Messianic texts, the charge of wilfully corrupting it was brought against the Jews, and largely believed, too, in those days, when anything evil was but too readily believed of them. But the charge is utterly unfounded. Though they kept this form of the word in the text, they always read it " they pierced," and it would seem that their reason for not correcting it even in the margin was because they held that the form K^AEI was gramma- tically consistent with the correct reading. The word occurs only once more in the Bible, Isa. xxxviii. 1 3, " Like a lion, so will He break all my hones," and there is an interesting note in the Massorah stating that it occurs only in these two places, and that it has a dif- ferent signification in each, thus clearly showing that in this verse of the Psalms they did not read it " like a lion." The fact, too, that all the versions read it as a verb, even those of Aquila and Symmachus, who were so deeply imbued with the teaching of the Pales- tine Jews, points to the same conclusion. 202 SPECIMENS OS CRITICAL WORK. XIV. '• AcTHOKiSED " Reading. Rbvisbbs' Rsadino. Iba. ix. 3 : Thou hast multi- Thou bast multiplied the n»tion | plied the nation, and not increased Thou hast increased to it the the joy ; they joy before Thee 'joy ; ' they joy before Thee, &c. according to the joy in harvest, &c. The new reading is so much more in keeping with the whole jubilant tone of this Lesson for Christmas Day, that it will commend itself to many who know nothing at all about the reasons for changing it. The "not increased their joy" always soundei so like a discord in the Christmas music. Tet, when we examine the Hebrew manuscripts, we find that all, except about ten or eleven, contain the objectionable reading. What right, then, had the revisers to change it ? There are two little Hebrew words of similar sound, rather like each other, too, in appearance, but very different in meaning. They are — ji^ = LO = not, Sh = l'o = to it ; and the question is which of these ought to be in the text. If the first be right, we must read, "NOT increased the joy ; " if the other, " increased to it the joy.'' Now, though the first is in the text of the manu- ' Freely translated, " Thou bast increased their joy," Revised Version. SPECIMENS OF CRITICAL WORK. 203 scripts, there is an asterisk placed over it by the Massoretic scribes, indicating what seemed to them an error, and directing ua to a footnote, which says, " Keri l'o," that is, " l'o should be read." True, we have sometimes to reject these Massoretic corrections as erroneous ; but here the context seems so obviously to require this reading, that the revisers felt themselves compelled to accept it, more especially when, on ex- amining the Targum and the Syriac and other ancient versions, they found them, for the most part, in agree- ment with it. In Ps. c. 3 is a similar correction, and on the same grounds, "It is He that hath made us, and WOT we ourselves," .reads in the Eevised Version, "It is He that hath made us, and we are His." Here, however, the old reading seems just as likely to be right as the new one. CHAPTEE III. A FURTHER USB OF THE ANCIENT BIBLES. I WANT here to illustrate very briefly a further use of the " Other Old Documents " in producing a correct Bible. Where a word occurs only once or twice in the Hebrew Bible, or where, from any other cause, its meaning is doubtful, these Old Versions are very use- ful in settling its correct translation. True, we cannot always entirely depend on them. One of them will sometimes contradict another. But it is evident that it must be a considerable help in deciding the meaning if we know how men two thousand years ago under- stood the word. Here are a few specimens and illus- trations : — " AuTHOBisKD " Reading. Revisers' Rkadino. Oek. zii. 6 : Abram passed Unto the oak of Moreh, through the land . . , unto the plain of Moreh. The meaning of the Hebrew word is doubtful. St. Jerome had to translate it in making his Vulgate 1500 years ago, and he rendered it the plain, and so do also the chief Jewish authorities. But the old Septuagint, 600 years earlier, always translates the A FURTHER USE OF THE ANCIENT BIBLES. 205 word oak, showing that that was the meaning it conveyed to them ; and the Syriac gives the same rendering. II. " AUTHOBISED " ReADINS. RbVIBEES' ReADINO. Gen.xzx. II: Leabsaid, AtroopI Leah aaid Fortunate I and the and she called his name Gad. called his name Gad. The word cried out by Leah was Gad ! It might possibly mean a troop, but it is not easy to fix its derivation. In our difficulty we turn to the Ancient Versions. The Septuagint has, " In good fortune ! " The Vulgate has, " Fortunately ! " The Syriac reads, " My fortune cometh ! " The Targum of Onkelos, " Fortune cometh ! " the Targum of Jonathan, " My good star cometh ! " so that evidently the whole weight of ancient testimony favours the new in- terpretation. m. " AuTHORisKD " Readino. Rbviserb' Readino. Ex. xzxiv. 13 : Te shall destroy And cut down their Asherim. their altars, break their images, KiEoiir and out down their groves. Probably th. wooden .ymboU of the goddeflfl Asherah. Here is a case where the English versions sought in the Ancient Versions the meaning of a word, and were set wrong by them. The Hebrew word is 2o6 A FURTHER USB OF THE ANCIENT BIBLES. ASHERIM, and the old English translators coald not tell what the strange word meant to its original readers; but they found that St. Jerome's Vulgate translated it "groves." St. Jerome had probably gone to the Septuagint fof the meaning, for we find it thus ren- dered by the old scholars of King Ptolemy. Evidently they were as much puzzled by the word as was St. Jerome, or the English translators who followed his lead. Thus the word " groves " got into the English Bible, and thus it remains to the present day. But any one who will carefully examine the difierent passages where it occurs will see at once that it cannot mean " groves." To " make," " set up," " break," are not terms generally used of a grove of trees. It most probably denoted some movable object of worship ; perhaps a figure of the goddess Ashtoreth, or, at any rate,, some rude wooden image used in connection with heathen worship. See, for example, 2 Kings xxiii. 6, where Josiah brought out the grove from the house of the Lord, and burnt it, and stamped it to powder; 2 Chron. xvii. 6 : Jehoshaphat took away the groves, &c., &c. The revisers, in their difficulty, cut the knot by simply printing the Hebrew word in English letters, and letting the reader make what he could of it ; so now the time-honoured " groves " are in future to be known as the " Asherim.'' A FURTHER USE OF THE ANCIENT BIBLES. 207 IV. " JLUTHORIBBD " BeADIHO, RzTIBXBS' BkADINO. Lbt. xri. 8, 10, 26 : The other lot for AzAzzi.. The other lot for the Boapegoat. This ia the only place where the Hebrew word AZAZEL occurs in the Old Testament-, and the question of its meaning is a long-standing difBculty. The English versions, from the " Great Bible " down, have taken the interpretation from St. Jerome's Vulgate. He renders it " caper emissarius " — " the goat that was sent out." Probably this was a guess from the con- text, or perhaps he got it from the old Bible of Symmachus (see Book ii. p. 158), who gives a similar meaning. The Septuagint translates it vaguely, as if at a loss what to make of it. Some other early writers think it means the devil. The Jews of the Middle Ages tell us that it meant some evil spirit. Where all was so hazy, doubtless the revisers acted wisely in leaving it as they found it, simply, as in the previous case of the Asherim, expressing the Hebrew pronuncia- tion in English letters, and so not committing them- selves to any theory on the subject. "Adthorised" Rbadino. Rbvissbs' Kkadimo, Judges viii. 13 : Gideon re- Gridoon returned from the battle turned from the battle before the from the ascent of Eeres. ton was up. The word hebes does mean the sun, but it may also 2o8 A FURTHER USE OP THE ANCIENT BIBLES. be a proper name; see i. 35, ii. 9. What is the true meaning? Did Gideon return "before the rising of the sun," or "from the height of Heres?" The Vulgate says the former, and most Jewish com- mentators agree with it. The Septuagint says "from the ascent of Ares." Where doctors differ who shall decide ? VI. "Authorised" Reading. Revisers' Reading. 2 Sam. viii. 18: David's David's sons were priests, sons were chief rulers. This is a very startling translation, if it be correct. If David's sons were priests, there must have been a serious neglect of the law which restricted the priest- hood to the family of Levi. The Hebrew word used is the same that in viii. 17 is applied to Zadok and Ahimelech the priests. It is also used of Ira the Jairite in ch. xx. 26, and later, in the list of Solomon's officers, of Zabud the son of Nathan, who was "a KOHEN, and the king's friend." But surely it is pos- sible that it may mean a chief minister either of Church or State. The Vulgate renders the word "priests," and is followed by Luther and by Cover- dale's Bible; but the Septuagint has "courtiers," and both the Syriac Bible and the Targums have "princes." So, as far as the guidance of the Old Versions will take us in fixing the translation, we cannot go along with the recent revisers. The question, however, is a A FURTHER USE OF THE ANCIENT BIBLES. 200 very difficult one, and important issues concerning what is called the higher criticisna are affected by it. VII. "Authorised" Reading. Revisers' Reading. 1 Kings xxii. 38: And one And they washed the chariot washed the chariot in the by the pool of Samaria, and pool of Samaria, and the dogs the dogs licked up his blood: licked up his blood, and they now the harlots washed them- washed his armour. selves there. The Hebrew word whose meaning is in question is ZONOTH. Now, in Hebrew, of course, as in English, it may happen that entirely different meanings may grow on to the same word.' The Hebrew word zonoth has not only the signification armour, but also, and much more frequently, the very different meaning, harlots. Which does it mean in the passage before us It is possible, to be sure, that the writer meant to inform us of the washing of Ahab's blood-stained armour. But considering the commoner signification of the word, does it not seem more probable that he meant to give an additional touch of ignominy to Ahab's wretched fate, by telling us that it was the pool where the harlots washed themselves in which the blood of the dead king was washed from the chariot ? We turn to the ancient Versions to aid us in the in- quiry, and find that the Syriac Bible eighteen centuries ago rendered the word "armour." The Targum gives » Take, for example, the English word post. 210 A FURTHER USE OF THE ANCIENT BIBLES. the same signification. But the old Septuagint trans- lators, four hundred years earlier, give it its commoner Hebrew meaning, " The harlots washed themselves " ; and we see the revisers have thought fit to follow their lead. I have nothing to do with the question as to which is the better translation, as my object is but to illus- trate this use of the Ancient Versions. And now, reader, our " Lesson in Biblical Criti- cism " is over. We have inquired into the accuracy of the Hebrew Writings, we have made the acquaint- antse of the chief Ancient Bibles of the world, we have learned some rudiments of Biblical Criticism, and, like schoolboys, worked out for ourselves little problems in our newly-acquired science. I trust all this may have been worth the doing, and may result in a more intelligent interest in the Bible. If the " Lesson" bring half as much interest and instruction to its learner as the preparation for it has brought to the teacher, it certainly will not have been learned in train. INDEX Aaron ben-Asheer, 100 Abgarus, Christ corretpondi with, 160 Abram and the fowls, 8 Accent marks, 98 Accuracy of Hebrew Bible, 67 Adonai substituted for Jehovah, 54 Ahab's armour, 209 Alexandrian Library, 145 Antiochus, 71, 102 Aquila and his translation, 74, 79, 154, 166 'Ark' or 'Ephod,' 190 Aristeas and the Septuaglnt, 145 Asherira and Groves, 205 Augustine and Jerome, 168 Axioms and Rules la Textual Cri- ticism, 24 Azazel and scapegoat, 207 Babylonian Schools, 100 Babylonian Talmud, 135 Buchanan, Dr., and Black Jews, 28 Cain and Abel, 119, 184 Catherine de Medici, 158 Christ corresponds with Syrian King, 160 Christ, Influence of Talmud on, 125 Clementine VIII version of Vulgate, 172 Codex Alexandrinus (LXX), 152 Codex of Bphraem, 158 Codex Ezras, 29 Codex Geneseos Cottonianus, 152 Complutensian Polyglot Bible, 169 Copying Manuscripts, Method of, 99 Copyists' mistakes, cause of, 53 Corruptions, Obvious in MSS., 46 Countings, letters, words, etc., 89 David and Goliath, 192 David and Joab, 9 David's sons, rulers or priests, 208 Defects in Revised Version, 179 ' Dots,' Meaning of, lost, 64 Douay Testament, 167 Editing and Revising by Ezra, 60, 63 Egypt, 430 years in, erroneous, 119 Elhanan slew ' Goliath,' 194 Elias Levita, 8, 14, 86, 88 Ephraem the Syrian, 157 Errors, Great majority trivial, 106 Errors, how crept in, 20 Esau's teeth, 64 Ezra, 5, 29, 60, 63 Gemaras, 75, 122 Gtrshom, son of Manasseh or Moie«, 188 GeseniuB eritielsu Samaritan MS. 118 Gheniza, burial place of MSS, 29, 35 Glbeonites, variations re, 187 ' God ' substituted for Jehovah, Si Gold for the Kings, 92 Gourd ud tha Ivy, 168 Great Synagogue, Men of the, 59 Gregory, Pope and Jerome's Vulgate, 169 ' Guardians of the Lines," 18 Guild of Scribes, 13 Hagadah, 126 Halachah, 125 Hebrew Bible, Purity of modern, 22 Hebrew writing, consonants only, 7 Hebrew writing, development, 5 Heres and the sun, 207 'House that Jack built' Origin of, 137 Hymn Books, Ancient, 51 Infallibility, Papal, 171 Jacob's bed or staff, 12 Jacob ben-Naphtali, 101 Jehovah, origin of word, 95, 99 Jehovah, ' the unspeakable name,' 54 Jerome and his works, 165 Jerusalem, Fall of, 72 Jesuits and Sixtus V. version, 172 Jewish reverence for words, 32 Justin Martyr and Septuagint, 146 Ker {What must be read), 93, 196 Kethibh {What is written), 93, 196 Koran, how uniformity was obtained in, 34 Leah, ' A troop ' or ' fortunate,' 205 Letters, deceiving uncertainty in, 16 Maccabees, MSS. preserved by, 70 Maimondes, Moses, 103 Manuscripts, all Heb. before A.D. 900 lost, 113 Manuscripts, number and description of, 28 Manuscript, Oldest Hebrew, 31 Manuscript of Palestine Jews, 32 Manuscript, Samaritan, 2, 45, 113 Massoretic text, origin of, 84 Massoretio text, sole authority, 33, 35 Materials used In ' making ' O.T. 38 Memory, I^eats of, 10 Mishna, 75, 122 Moabite stone, style of writing, 2 13 Moreh, Plain or Oak of, 204 Nablous, Manuscript of, 114 ' Not increased the joy,' 23, 202 Old Testament revision, 178 Origen, 80, 159 Palimpsest Manuscript, 158 Papal infallibility tested, 171 Paul and the Septuagint, 143 Pentateuch, age of in present form, 37 Pentateuch of black Jews >t Malabar, 29 Pentateuch, the Jewish Bible, 41, 62 Poem on Alphabet, 90 Printing, Psahni first In A.D, 1477, 103 212 INDEX Psalms Prayer-Book version, 68, 167 Ptolemy and the Septuagint, 145 Repeated passages. Value of, 49 Repetition, Cause of, 106 Return of Jews under Ezra, 57 Revision, Plan followed in, 178 Rhemish Testament, 167 ' Rip Van Winkle ' ancient, 135 Rome, Church of, her attitude, 117 Samaritan and Jewish Text Compared, 121 Samaritan MSS., 21, 45, 113, 118 Samuel's first-bom, 198 Sandalphon, 113 Saul "reigned one year," 189 Schools for preservation of Scriptures, 73 Septuagint, 67, 70, 143 Septuagint before Massorab and Talmud, 144 Septuagint, Bible of Christ and Apostles, 110, 143 Septuagint, cause of mistakes in, 63, 149 Septuagint, Errors in, 8, 148 Septuagint, Origin edits the, 151 Septuagint, Origin and purpose of, 66, 144, 148, 149 Shapira manuscripts. Fraud of, 3 Siloam inscriptions, 3, 13 Sinaitic MSS. of Septuagint, 152 Sixtus V, Pope, corrects the Vulgate, 170 'Sleeping Beauty,' 136 ■ Specimens of Critical work, 184 Standard Hebrew Bible, 102, 105 Syriac Bible and its value, 157, 163 Syriac (Peshitto) version, 79 Talmud, 75, 122, 128 Targums, 80, 122, 140, 142 Targum of Jonathan, 141 Targum of Onkelos, 141 Textual criticism, DeSnition of, 22 * Textus Receptus,' 33 Tittle, The, 5, 77 Torah, 75 Traditions of Creation and Deluge, 38 Ussher, Archbishop, MSS. of, 115 Vatican Codert (Septuagint), 152 Vowels, Errors through absence of 8 Vowel-letters, Introduced by Ezra, 64 Vowel-points invented by Massoretes, 97 Vowel-points, recent origin of, 14 Vowel-points, tradition not inspiration, 98 Vowelless words, pronunciation memorised, 10 Vulgate of Jerome, 80, 165 Vulgate, Rome's standard version 169 Yahweh, 94, 99 Yod, The, 5, 16 SfiSifiHiS niSSsSM nSi V , ! ?J t^Ifiaii uSI m ■ iiilil m m-