the study of archaic Hebrew forms. It is intermediate between the Assyrian and the Hebrew in its stage of linguistic developThe inscriptions also throw a great light upon the religion of the inhabitants of ancient Canaan.

ment.

The Hebrew language itself is more extensive than the Hebrew of the Bible. It was the language of the ancient inhabitants of Canaan. This dialect is preserved only in a few proper names, and in the glosses to the Tell-el-Amarna Letters.1

The Moabite dialect was unknown until 1868, when the socalled Moabite stone was discovered at Dibon, on the east of the Jordan. This stone is now in the Louvre at Paris. It dates from the ninth century B.C. It is also called the Mesha Stone from the contents of the inscription. It is valuable for the side light it casts upon biblical history, and also upon the modes of writing ancient Hebrew.2

The biblical Hebrew has several stages of development, and also dialects. The archaic, classic, and post-classic forms may be distinguished in the Bible. There was also an Ephraimitic dialect, tending to the Aramaic; a trans-Jordanic, tending to the Arabic; besides the Judaic, which became the classic type of Hebrew.

The only ancient Hebrew apart from the Bible is the Siloam inscription discovered in 1880.4 This is valuable for its explanation of ancient methods of writing words as well as for archæological interests.

An interesting and valuable specimen of Hebrew has recently

1 H. Winckler, The Tell-el-Amarna Letters, Berlin and New York, 1896.

2 Clermont Ganneau, La Stele de Mesa Roi de Moab, Paris, 1870; Smend and Socin, Die Inschrift des Königs Mesa, Freib., 1886.

3 Gesenius, Thesaurus philologicus criticus linguæ Hebrææ et Chaldææ V. T., 3 Tom. 1835-1853; Gesenius, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das A. T. 12te Aufl. von F. Buhl, 1895; A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament based on the Lexicon of Gesenius as translated by Ed. Robinson, edited by Francis Brown, with the coöperation of S. R. Driver and C. A. Briggs, Parts I.-VII., 1891-1899; König, Historisch-kritisches Lehrgebäude der Hebräischen Sprache, 3 Theile, 1881-1897; Gesenius, Heb. Gram. umgearbeitet von E. Kautzsch, 26te Aufl., 1896, trans. by Collins and Cowley, Oxford, 1898.

* Briggs, "Siloam Inscription," Presbyterian Review, 1882. See also Driver, Books of Samuel, 1890, pp. xv. seq.

been discovered in part of the Hebrew text of the apocryphal book of "Ecclesiasticus or the Wisdom of Ben Sira."1

The post-biblical Hebrew is a later development of the language in the direction of the Aramaic. It appears in the second and third Christian centuries in the Mishna, and the Baraithoth of the Talmud, and in commentaries on the Pentateuch. The new Hebrew is the language of the schools, and is no more a living tongue than the Latin of the schools is a living Latin.2

4. The Aramaic group may be divided into the eastern and western families. The eastern includes the primitive language of northeastern Syria, the Syriac, the Mandaic, and the language of the Babylonian Gemara. The western includes the Palestinian dialect of the Aramaic, the Samaritan language, the language of Palmyra, and the Nabatean. The eastern Aramaic presents the oldest and strongest forms. The chief member of the family is the Syriac, which has a very extensive Christian literature, embracing the most important early versions of the New Testament from the second Christian century, several other important versions of the Bible, a considerable number of early apocryphal and pseudepigraphical writings, the works of the great theologian Ephraem of the fourth century, and a large amount of literature extending deep into the Middle Ages. Modern Syriac is spoken at present in Kurdistan and at Tur Abdin on the Tigris.4

A branch of eastern Aramaic is the dialect of the Mandæans, or Sabians, or Christians of St. John, who still survive in the neighbourhood of Basra and Wasit in lower Babylonia.5

1 Cowley, Neubauer, and Driver, The Original Hebrew of a Portion of Ecclesiasticus (3915-4911), Oxford, 1897.

2 Geiger, Lehrbuch zur Sprache der Mishna, Breslau, 1845; Strack, H. L., Lehrbuch der Neuhebräischen Sprache und Litteratur, Karlsruhe, 1884. See, also, pp. 232 seq. 3 See p. 212.

4 See Noeldeke, Theo., Kurzgefasste Syrische Grammatik, Leipzig, 1880; Nestle, Syriac Grammar with Bibliography, Chrestomathy, and Glossary, 1889 ; Duval, Traité de Gram. Syr., Paris, 1881; Brockelmann, Lex. Syr., Berlin and Edinburgh, 1895; Smith, R. Payne, Thesaurus Syriacus, Oxford, 1868–1897 ; Castell, Edm., Lexicon Syriacum, Göttingen, 1788.

5 Their chief writings are the Ginza or Sidra Rabba, called the Book of Adam, and Sidra d'Yahya, or Book of John. See Noeldeke, Mandäische Grammatik, Halle, 1875; Petermann, Thesaurus sive Liber Magnus, 2 Bd., Berlin, 1867.

E

The Babylonian Gemara and the Rabbinical literature founded thereon give another important dialect of the eastern Aramaic.1

The western Aramaic presents the latest stage of the language in many respects. The earliest member of this family is the Samaritan, which is a strange mixture of Aramaic and Hebrew, using side by side the Aramaic and the Hebrew forms of the relative pronoun and the plural of nouns, the Aramaic emphatic state, and the Hebrew article. But the language is essentially Aramaic. It has reached a more advanced stage of decay than any other of the Shemitic stock. Its literature is important, embracing a Targum of the Pentateuch, which dates in its written form from the second Christian century, and a number of historical, liturgical, and theological writings.2

The ruins of Palmyra give inscriptions in another dialect of western Aramaic. The rocks of the peninsula of Sinai, of Petra, and the Huaran afford many inscriptions in a dialect that is called Nabatean.3

The Aramaic contained in the Old Testament, the Aramaic specimens in the New Testament, the dialect of the Palestinian Gemara, and the Rabbinical literature founded thereon are all in the western Aramaic language.

The early Palestinian Christians seem to have used a dialect of the western Aramaic. Some specimens of this dialect have recently been discovered."

All these languages are more closely related to one another

1 Levy, Jacob, Chaldäisches Wörterbuch, 2 Bd., Leipzig, 1876; Neuhebräisches und Chaldäisches Wörterbuch über die Talmudim und Midrashim, 4 Bd., Leipzig, 1876-1889; Dalman, Aramäisch Neuhebräisches Wörterbuch zu Targum, Talmud und Midrasch, Teil I., 1897. See, also, pp. 232, 233.

2 See Petermann, Brevis Linguiæ Samaritanæ, Berlin, 1873; Briggs, article on "Samaritans" in Johnson's Cyclopædia; Nutt, Samaritan History, Dogma, and Literature, London, 1874.

See Neubauer in Studia Biblica, Oxford, 1885, I. 3.

4 Luzzato, Grammar of the Biblical Chaldaic Language, New York, 1876; Brown, C R., Aramaic Method, New York, 1884; Kautzsch, Gram. d. Bibl. Aram., Leipzig, 1884; Strack, Gram. d. Bibl. Aram., Leipzig, 1897.

5 Meyer, Jesu Muttersprache. Das galiläische Aramäisch in seine Bedeutung für die Erklärung der Reden Jesu. Frei. 1896. See pp. 404, 405.

6 Dalman, Gram. d. jüdisch-palästinischen Aramäisch, Leipzig, 1894; Aramäische Dialektproben, Leipzig, 1896.

7 Lewis, A Palestinian Syriac Lectionary, Cambridge, 1897; Schwally, Idioticon des christlich-paläst. Aramäisch, Giessen, 1893.

than those of the Indo-Germanic family, the people speaking them having been confined to comparatively narrow limits, crowded on the north by the Indo-Germanic tongues, and on the south by the Turanian. These languages are grouped in sisterhoods. They all go back upon an original mother-tongue of which all traces have been lost. In general the Arabic or Southern group presents the older and fuller forms of etymology and syntax, the Aramaic or Northern group the later and simpler forms. The Hebrew and Assyrian groups lie in the midst of this linguistic development, where the Assyrian is nearer to the Southern group and the Hebrew to the Northern group. The differences in stage of linguistic growth from the common stock depend not so much upon the period or distance of separation as upon literary culture. The literary use of a language has the tendency to reduce the complex elements to order, and to simplify and wear away the superfluous and unnecessary forms of speech and syntactical construction. These languages have, for the most part, given us a considerable literature; they were spoken by the most cultivated nations of the ancient world, mediating between the great centres of primitive culture - the Euphrates and the Nile. Everything seems to indicate that they all emigrated from a common centre in the desert on the south of Babylonia,1 the Arabic group separating first, next the Aramaic, then the Hebrew, while the Babylonian gained ultimately the mastery of the original population of Babylonia, and the Assyrian founded the great empire on the Tigris.

II. THE HEBREW LANGUAGE

We have already, in the previous section, considered the Hebrew group of languages in general; we have now to study the Hebrew language more particularly, especially as it is presented to us in the Sacred Scriptures. The book of Genesis 2 represents Abram as going forth from Ur in Babylonia, at first northward into Mesopotamia, and then emigrating to Canaan,

1 Schrader, Die Abstammung der Chaldäer und die Ursitze der Semiten, Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. M. G., 1873. 2 Gen. 1131.

just as we learn from other sources the Canaanites had done before him. The monuments of Ur reveal that about this time, 2000 B.C., it was the seat of a great literary development. The father of the faithful, whose origin was in that primitive seat of culture, and who lived as a chieftain of military prowess,2 and exalted religious and moral character among the cultivated nations of Canaan; and who was received at the court of Pharaoh,3 that other great centre of primitive culture, on friendly terms, to some extent at least made himself acquainted with their literature and culture. Whether Abraham adopted the language of the Canaanites, or brought the Hebrew with him from the East, is unimportant, for the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian are nearer to the Hebrew and Phoenician than they are to the other Shemitic families. If these languages, as now presented to us, differ less than the Romance languages, the daughters of the Latin; in their earlier stages in the time of Abraham their difference could scarcely have been more than dialectic. The ancient Phoenician, the nearest akin to the Hebrew, was the language of commerce and intercourse between the nations in primitive times, as the Aramaic after the fall of Tyre, and the Greek after the conquest of Alexander. Thus the Hebrew language, as a dialect of the Canaanite and closely related to the Babylonian, had already a considerable literary development prior to the entrance of Abraham into the Holy Land. The older scholars were naturally inclined to the opinion that Egypt was the mother of Hebrew civilization and culture. This has been disproved; for, though the Hebrews remained a long period in Egyptian bondage, they retained their Eastern civilization, culture, and language, so that at the Exodus they shook off at once the Egyptian culture as alien and antagonistic to their own. the very peculiarities of the Hebrew language, literature, and civilization are those of the Babylonian. The biblical traditions of the Creation, of the Deluge, of the Tower of Babel, are those of the Assyrians and Babylonians. The sacred restday, with the significance of the number seven, the months, 1 George Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis, etc., pp. 29 seq. New York, 1876. 2 Gen. 14. 3 Gen. 1214 seq.

For