& c <_ c <r ■• <c:«bc c & 
 recces- <c r«gr 
 
 r<x:< 
 
 
 
 c c: 
 
 <i at' 
 
 c <: 
 
 
 c <z 
 
 «Sfcf<! 
 
 c c 
 
 <CW!Pi 
 
 cl:<jz 
 
 CSLsi- ^ 
 
 < «z. 
 
 *^T«C" 
 
 c <r 
 
 **Tfr«.' 
 
 r ^- <r: 
 
 a^r < 
 
 c<r 
 
 *C£M 
 
 <X <r 
 
 osejej! 
 
 c <: 
 
 «ar*5v 
 
 ( r ^~? 
 
 «ttv< 
 
 c tec -«- «r 
 
 <r c~<rc <x in' f, 
 
 " CC Cc 
 
 ^Cc ccccce- 
 .jiwcrcr •cccxrr. 
 
 c « 
 
 reef* 
 
 c <r c c* •■< 
 
 
 «a 
 
 
 *£S 
 
 < c ■ 
 
 OQ* 
 
 : crcfc 
 
 <®gp 
 
 <<orc. 
 
 
 s < <r < > 
 
 
 <! cr < << 
 
 
 •f ~«r ~<~ r " 
 
 £ <u* 
 
 
 «<< 
 
 «- '—<^-. -*■*?' 
 
 
 ST cc '^rrr. . -jfe" 
 
 <sc cr c > 
 
 
 
 r 
 
 
 ^«cr<< <^< 
 
 y . <T. <r v <r <c eft 
 
 . <L * 
 
 
 
 
 «rsc cV 
 
 5CT <: ^^^^^ 
 
 re rr
 
 ■n 
 
 <r<c <3Ccc «m 
 
 c> €jtC <(<' mat < 
 
 £ «£c <e *3C~~CO C 
 
 
 
 mZ<<<*< «-cc.* 
 
 
 r < ■ ■ ■ • <T- <•<■■<■ 
 
 r c<t. <:<rcccc 
 
 
 c<r< <•- <r <:<' 
 
 <"C <r • ■ 
 
 c< < < * 
 
 '<" <~ < 
 
 <<z<: 
 
 c<c 
 
 r 
 
 • <* 
 
 < 
 * 
 < 
 
 c«r<r< 
 
 
 ■ * 
 
 * 
 < 
 
 • mr. 
 
 ■ « « • 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 <: c <-? 
 
 « 
 
 <-<: 
 
 Cc C 
 
 « 
 
 <^c- c 
 
 CT< « 
 
 
 <4C ■ ■< 
 
 :< c < 
 
 T < 
 
 c< <3 
 
 < <r < 
 
 * 
 
 ^^~ < -r < 
 
 '< < c 
 
 4 
 
 mr <5i 
 
 CC < 
 
 4f 
 
 cc 
 
 VC c <- 
 
 41 
 
 & <cc< 
 
 Cfc ■ 
 
 4| 
 
 a 
 
 
 «■ < 
 
 < 
 
 «" < 
 
 
 4 
 
 ' c 
 
 » 
 
 c 
 
 ^<r <^ 
 
 
 c 
 
 r r . 
 
 1 
 
 <r 
 
 
 <C * 
 
 'C 
 
 c< 
 
 • « 
 
 r< 
 
 c. 
 
 r < 
 
 r 
 
 - r<r, C 
 
 < < <4 
 
 • 
 
 C «"<J 
 
 
 c « «»r 
 
 
 * * , 
 
 
 ^ ^C^l 
 
 «L '« 
 
 
 «- «.<:c 
 
 c* C 
 
 
 « ^ 
 
 sc « 
 
 
 
 
 K. c *- 
 
 ^ r 
 
 
 C< 
 
 c<:< cc 
 
 : « 
 
 "■ <c 
 
 
 
 ccc 
 
 - '■ CCC/ ' 
 < <. < <c< <
 
 c - cc ^ «b^ «s«^r t cc 
 
 C C C C C cr «55ir cc 
 .,cv c c i c *r<Grt- c<« 
 
 jcrsSL.^ 
 
 c cescSL 
 
 c Ccc c «n 
 
 ~T8 <3T 9^ 
 
 C CC« CcC<jfc «f £^CC 
 
 -«crc<g: cccsr «££gp 
 
 > «xc«r: <r<a».«cc ^y^yzm 
 
 *S ; cc cccs^«v? « cc <p-« 
 
 c<r <r c re ««r 
 
 rcct '«C 
 
 
 "c£ C C<jG <<T^ 
 3£C C CC «d_ 
 <K3£C <JfS£ «r 
 
 ^L«tc <r «x: • 
 
 . c«zr<^ cc: 
 
 "CT<ST Cc C«C7 ~OC<C< 
 "CdC ccc«; .C*«3£ 
 
 CC < 
 "Cc 
 
 "CC'CC 
 
 
 c «xr<c c 1^j££ 
 <3CCCC< <m 
 
 ~XL C«C 
 
 ""C C«3 «9C_ C<^ 5 
 
 ct < cos ccrcc« f > 
 
 =Vrc <CCA CC 
 
 ■c <id «a 
 
 ?cc<s 
 
 ' OS KC «T"C<"< 
 
 crccc cc<- 
 r -feats: «:<" f 
 
 «Z7jCCC 
 
 — <c<2C«r:c 
 "iiGrc 
 
 ■^Tcf - 
 
 CCC'f < 
 
 cc <ccc<c 
 
 
 C" ■ c^cc^occ^.*: 
 
 ■ <TC C<C«3C C^ 
 v« ■ cCCcc «3C7c^ -re? 
 
 xc CC<1CC£1 
 
 t V ' C 
 
 <r c c_c 
 
 < -«■ <r^ 
 
 6 CC 
 
 !r« ex 
 
 ( - cc 
 
 CM&CC C<T ^ c<r^c '"^ICC 
 
 ^:c cc «X «c s 
 
 " t_ c<: ^cc <sC<r « 
 
 cc <r «rc^ 
 
 ^^ <*m& 
 
 <:<r fgrcc < 
 
 
 cc 
 
 C CC 
 
 c <:<- 
 
 re*" «acr ccc 
 
 < cr <K21 CC«C 
 
 -■a c 
 
 ; c cere 
 
 . COr cr, 
 
 -QC2 -CCcc « 
 
 ^C^ -rcrr 
 ^''CCtc 
 
 ;_C/ «rr 
 
 CC<. '<cr 
 
 CCT fcrC - 
 
 CC <ccv. 
 
 3TCL CC C 
 
 recce c 
 
 CCCr- < 
 
 XC <c < 
 
 Cc cc < 
 
 CZ<1 
 
 - <^c^ <kccc c cc nee 
 
 c<3c:c cc «grccc cc cc? 
 
 rccc e 4tCKS- c d err <cc 
 
 ^c«r< ccc 
 
 % CC C CC ccc- <ri 
 =c cc: C C<? CCCC ,r 
 5£ cc <T <LC <Cc c 
 "1« cc <Z <L<r< rrcy , V 
 <T CCCCC r<jCLc cc ^ 
 
 <c <r«c «r cc . «-<-■ tc . 
 —. CT«3CJ_ cc< 
 C'CCc- cc<7 
 _<c or? cc 
 ,_r<r cc ccc *vr - c 
 
 Leer #: .p~^sF¥;ff f<" ^ -.8-. 
 H!fsti^£: ^E ^«:t ^ IBS? ..' 
 
 ocrcrcccc ^ 
 
 ^ or ,<c_ <: 
 
 ccc c: 
 
 CC €C 
 
 c«sC CC£«<SL"«£ '<3T 
 
 .{-c;ccc<cc: - 
 
 ^JC C« 
 
 C CC <Tcc" j 
 
 vCCcc-Or
 
 (till
 
 V 
 
 LITERARY REMAINS 
 
 OF THE LATE 
 
 EMANUEL DEUTSCH. 
 
 WITH A BRIEF MEMOIR. 
 
 LONDON: 
 JOHN MUKEAY, ALBEMAELE STREET. 
 
 1874. 
 
 Tlie right of Translation is reserved.
 
 miSTTD DT WILLIAM < LOWES ANP BOSS, STAMFORD STKEKT 
 ASS CHASIKO CB06S.
 
 PJ 
 
 3003 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Memoir v 
 
 I. The Talmud 1 
 
 II. Islam 59 
 
 III. Notes of a Lecture on the Talmud 135 
 
 IV. A Lecture delivered at the Midland Institute, Bir- 
 
 mingham 145 
 
 V. Notes of a Lecture on Semitic Paleography .. .. 153 
 
 VI. Notes of Three Lectures on Semitic Culture .. .. 159 
 
 VII. Egypt, Ancient and Modern 173 
 
 VIII. Hermes Trismegistus 181 
 
 IX. Judeo-Arabic Metaphysics 191 
 
 N. Les ApOtres 197 
 
 XI. Five Letters on the GEcumentcal Council 211 
 
 XII. Apostolioe Sedis 265 
 
 XIII. The Eoman Passion Drama 285 
 
 XIV. On Semitic Languages 293 
 
 XV. On the Targums 319 
 
 XVI. On the Samaritan Pentateuch 404 
 
 XVK. The Book of Jasher 440 
 
 XVIII. Early Arabic Poetry 449 
 
 XIX. Arabic Poetry in Spain and Sicily 457 
 
 onooc/i *?
 
 MEMO IK. 
 
 Emanuel Oscak Menahem Deutsch was bom at Neisse in 
 Prussian Silesia on the 28th of October, 1829J of Jewish 
 parents, whose family had been settled there for some 
 generations. 
 
 In the atmosphere of his home he breathed a certain 
 amount of intelligence and learning, but yet more of affection. 
 There are perhaps no people on earth in whom the ties of 
 relationship are so strong as among the Jews, and especially 
 among the German Jews ; the tenderness of the mother is 
 scarcely equal even to the bond of close affection that usually 
 exists between father and son. In the Deutsch family it 
 was remarkably powerful, and continued so to the end. At 
 the age of six, the young Emanuel entered the " Gymnasium" 
 of Neisse, and remained in it for two years ; but at the end 
 of this time his father yielded to the entreaties of his uncle 
 David Deutsch, then residing at Mislowitz, and gave up the 
 boy's education into his hands. This uncle was a man of 
 great learning : he was a Eabbi who had made the Talmud 
 his especial study, and had written several scholarly works. 
 The education was a severe one for so young a student. 
 Winter and summer he had to rise at five o'clock, and to 
 study without fire or food for one hour or two, until the time 
 of the daily prayer had arrived, in which another hour was 
 passed. The rest of the day, until 8 p.m., was passed in close
 
 \ i MEMOIl!. 
 
 application to his books, one quarter of an hour being the 
 only time allowed for recreation, and about the same for 
 exercise and fresh air. He used to look back to these years 
 with painful self-pity, although his attachment to his uncle 
 was profound and tender, and his gratitude to him un- 
 bounded. 1 On completing his thirteenth year Emanuel 
 returned to Neisse, to celebrate his Bar-mitzva or religious 
 majority, when it is the custom for Jewish lads to read pub- 
 licly in the Synagogue a portion of the lesson from Scripture 
 on the first following Sabbath. The sentence that fell to his 
 share was this : " Get thee out of thy country, and from thy 
 kindred and from thy father's house." (Gen. xii. 1.) He then 
 resumed his studies at the Gymnasium, and notwithstanding 
 his separation from his uncle, rejoiced to find himself again 
 at Xeisse, of which he was very fond. 
 
 The town is situated in a broad valley watered by the 
 Neisse : it is a fortress of the second rank, garrisoned by 
 about 5000 soldiers. Here is his own account of it : — 
 
 "In the most eastern part of Germany, in that corner where Russia, 
 Prussia, and Austria meet, lies the province of Silesia. Very hardly con- 
 tested by Maria Theresa, and hardly won by Frederick, it now forms the 
 finest jewel in the crown of Prussia. The inhabitants are an industrious, 
 intelligent, and above all, a merry people; there is a vivacity in them 
 which has earned for them the epithet of the ' Frenchmen of Germany," 
 but their good-natured, childlike naivete has also made them proverbial 
 throughout the whole realm. Less rigid than the Prussians of the north, 
 they have more of the Austrian volubility : except where, close to the 
 boundaries of Russia, Sclavonic elements are so largely mixed with the 
 populace as to make them 'stupid.'" 
 
 The contrasts that struck him day by day yet early in his 
 youth, between the wit and wisdom ho found in his Hebrew 
 literature, and these "stupid" people made an impression 
 upon him that he often referred to in after life; his sole 
 amusement Beems to have been watching the "rough, narrow- 
 
 1 Dr. David Deutsch outlived his nephew only two months.
 
 MEMOIR. VH 
 
 brained peasantry," bringing in provisions on most primitive 
 carts to supply the garrison in the " much-respected fortress." 
 
 Stimulated by his love of learning, Emanuel entered the 
 highest class of the Gymnasium against the wish of his 
 parents, for, in the then unpleasant state of political affairs 
 in Prussia, they not unnaturally opposed his embracing <» a 
 learned profession, and would have preferred his devoting 
 himself to the business of their house. But this was impos- 
 sible to him. It is the custom in the "high schools" of 
 Silesia for the pupils in the highest class to attend for two 
 years ; until that period is accomplished they are not per- 
 mitted to go up for " Matriculation." In this case, before six 
 months had elapsed, the masters found that Emanuel was 
 capable of passing, and requested that he might do so : the 
 higher authorities refused, on the ground that no excep- 
 tion to the rule could be made even for exceptional fitness ; 
 and it was not until petition after petition had been presented 
 by the masters collectively, stating that they had nothing 
 more to teach him, and representing the unfairness of keep- 
 ing him at school, that they yielded to the pressure put upon 
 them. He then proceeded to the University of Berlin, where 
 he devoted himself at first chiefly to the study of Theology, 
 without, however, relinquishing those Talmudic studies to 
 which so much of his life had already been devoted. The 
 enormous mass of transcriptions and translations from the 
 Talmud which was found after his death, — beginning in the 
 handwriting of a child, and continued up to within a very 
 few years ago, — almost seemed in itself the work of an 
 ordinary lifetime. 
 
 He was now just sixteen ; and from this time forth, like 
 many another German student, he supported himself entirely, 
 paying his board, lodging, and fees by giviug lessons. A 
 year or two after, some Judaic stories and poems published
 
 \iii MEMOIR. 
 
 in magazines — written with great elegance and full of 
 interest — had earned him florins enough for his first excur- 
 sion towards "Father Rhine" beyond his own land. 
 
 During his stay in Berlin he had thoroughly mastered 
 English, and had made extensive studies in English literature. 
 lit 1855 Mr. Albert Cohen, of the firm of Asher and Co., 
 in Berlin, was commissioned by the British Museum to 
 recommend an assistant for the library department : Emanuel 
 Deutsch had long been desirous of some means of visiting- 
 England, and when the appointment was offered to him he 
 accepted it joyfully. He had then very little idea that it 
 would be more than a temporary employment. He knew no 
 one in the country, and little enough of English ways and 
 habits. But he was considered by others, and he knew him- 
 self to be more than lit for the office. 
 
 A fragment concerning his studies, written in 1872, may 
 be here inserted : 
 
 " In magnis voluisse — is it enough? who among us has not at some time 
 or other striven for some high thing ? and the preparation for the task . . . 
 it would seem as if this bad been, not rough hewn, but shaped with all the 
 wise deliberation of a kindest Fate. Before 1 knew how to read and write 
 the language of the land wherein I was born, my lips were taught to 
 stammer the Aleph-Beth, and to recite my prayers in the tongue of David. 
 As I grew up, Homer and Virgil stood side by side on my boyish bookshelf 
 with the Mishnah and the Midrash. And before I was inured in the 
 Akademe of Plato ami his friends, it was deemed well to steep my soul for 
 a time absolutely in that ocean called the Talmud : and to teach me fierce 
 dialectics in the discussions of Rabina and Rah Ashi before I learnt to 
 contrast tbe fierce lightnings that shook the rafters of Sura and Pumbeditha 
 with the mild, serene, ironically smiling lips of Sokrates. And while 
 Bengstenberg insisted with stentorian voice on every word of Scripture 
 being verbally inspired, and the Ilyksos being the sons of Jacob, Vatke, 
 next duor to him, represented the furthest steps of the non-Mosaic origin 
 and authorship even of the Ten Commandments. 
 
 "Then leaving these theological arenas I found myself at the feet of 
 Boeckh, who, with Attic grace opened up the arena of classic Hellas, 
 making the cistce mysticce become clear revelations ; under his guidance I 
 saw that favoured branch of mankind at their play, in their earnestness, in 
 the house and the market-place, in war and peace, their slaves, their
 
 MEMOIR. ix 
 
 -\vouien and children, their seers and priests, their poets and poetesses : and 
 this while Meineke taught me Horace by the light of Herman and Heine. 
 
 " And to open my eyes for the greater features of human strivings, how 
 out of barbarism grew the light and glory of the Renaissance and thence to 
 the presence of our own day — and to show the bright germs of those 
 goodly trees of freedom under whose shadows the peoples of Europe now 
 dwell— was there not Ranke : while Hitter took us " from Greenland's icy 
 mountains to Sah'ra's burning sands," and spoke of all plants, from the 
 cedars of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows in the ruins of Vizagapatam? 
 To enable me better to understand the British Museum, the treatises on 
 the Mine and Thine, and the Gate of the Trover, was there not Stahl, the 
 brilliant and erudite German Disraeli, who defended Throne and State 
 and a faith not that of his fathers, and interpreted to us the Pandects and 
 the Institutes? 
 
 "Enough of those days and the feasts spread before me: feasts of 
 erudition, wisdom, and grace, within which, as the Talmud has it, the 
 mother of the calf was yet more anxious to give suck than was the calf 
 always to drink. The evenings passed, while the mind was too overwrought 
 for midnight study, in sitting entranced before the noblest sons and daughters 
 of Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, and Sophocles; or Beethoven and 
 Mendelssohn lulled the soul to blissful unconsciousness, or roused it to 
 glow and enthusiasm unspoken. 
 
 " Then for nigh twenty years it was my privilege to dwell in the very 
 midst of that Pantheon called the British Museum, the treasures whereof, 
 be they Egyptian, Homeric, palimpsest or Babylonian cuneiforms, the 
 mutilated glories of the Parthenon, or the Etruscan mysterious grotesque- 
 ness, were all at my beck and call, all days, all hours — Alexandria, Rome, 
 Carthage, Jerusalem, Sidon, Tyre, Athens . . . ." 
 
 Here the fragment abruptly ends, without having men- 
 tioned v. Hagen who was his teacher in old German poetry 
 and the " folk-lore " in which he delighted : and Bencke his 
 teacher in psychology. 
 
 He had joined the British Museum in 1855. For fifteen 
 years with mighty ardour and magnificent industry he studied 
 and wrote, wrote and studied ; enjoying life among his 
 friends, yet more among his books : shedding sunshine where- 
 ever he went, attracting and attaching not a few. It is 
 impossible now to collect all his works, for he wrote lavishly 
 and gave away prodigally, while looking onwards with eyes 
 fixed on the magnum, ojms that was to be the work of his 
 life — a treatise on the Talmud, to be followed by other
 
 x MEMOIR 
 
 expositions of ancient Jewish literature. But 190 essays 
 and articles written for ' Chambers's Encyclopedia ' form in 
 themselves a goodly show, besides the articles from 'Smith's 
 Dictionary of the Bible,' and ' Kitto's Cyclopedia of Biblical 
 Literature,' which, by the special kindness of the editors, are 
 reprinted in this volume. In October 1867 the brief article 
 in the ' Quarterly Review,' sent forth as an avant-courrier, 
 excited so much attention both in England and on the Con- 
 tinent, that he was at once launched, as it were, from the 
 obscurity of a student into a rather unenviable notoriety : 
 and his time was a good deal cut up by the endless applica- 
 tions for lectures, articles, &c., with which he was besieged. 
 Encouraged, elated, he certainly was; but he worked on 
 steadily and had made considerable advances before illness 
 overtook him. 
 
 A proposal was made to him at the commencement of the 
 Abyssinian war to accompany our army into that country, as it 
 was thought that some valuable manuscripts and other 
 important antiquities might have rewarded the researches 
 of a scholar. For this his knowledge of Amharic and its cog- 
 nate languages would have peculiarly fitted him. Fortunately 
 he yielded to the advice of one or two of his friends, and 
 declined an appointment that would have sadly wasted his 
 valuable time. Experience justified the prudence of their 
 counsels, since nothing of the slightest importance was found 
 in the country. 
 
 But this proposal, and a special invitation, unsought by 
 him, from Nubar Pasha, to witness the opening of the Suez 
 Canal, had presented the thoughts of travel in the East so 
 closely to him, that all the natural and old yearnings of his 
 heart were too completely awakened to slumber again. An 
 
 1 This article was within a year translated into German, French, Swedish, 
 Russian] Danish and Dutch.
 
 MEMOIR. xi 
 
 official commission from the British Museum, for the exami- 
 nation of certain localities in Cyprus and other places, had 
 been suggested, and he was keen to go : he therefore 
 earnestly requested the authorities to extend his annual 
 leave from four weeks to eight, by uniting the leave of two 
 years, to enable him to visit the Holy Land, even offering 
 to forego his salary if necessary. He obtained ten weeks 
 leave, and started 7th March 1869, returning 10th May. 
 Unhappily the journey was too rapid and fatiguing even 
 for his strength : with but little money at his command 
 he underwent many hardships, and it is believed that he 
 there laid the foundation of the disease of which he died. 
 But in spite of these he enjoyed it all : " the sights and 
 sounds of the real East — the full splendours of the days 
 and nights — the trees and flowers, the holy stones, the 
 wild fragrances " — worked up his ardent nature into an 
 enthusiasm in which all the lofty patriotism of his race, 
 all the passionate love of his fervid Oriental nature, 
 and all the poetry of his artist heart, found vent. He 
 dated his first letter from the shores of Palestine " The 
 East: all my wild yearnings fulfilled at last!" Indeed, 
 he was himself astonished at the emotion that choked him 
 when he found himself among his own people at the Wailing- 
 place in Jerusalem, and he could seldom speak of it after- 
 wards without tears. "And I, too, in Phoenicia!" Fatigue 
 and pain vanished when he beheld the Phoenician mason's 
 marks, some of which his eyes were the first to distinguish 
 on the walls of Sidon and Jerusalem. 
 
 But the very intensity of his enjoyment helped to wear 
 him out. On his return he drew up a valuable and most 
 interesting report of his journey for the Trustees of the 
 British Museum, and delivered at least a dozen lectures, 
 chiefly on the subject of Phoenicia, in various parts of the
 
 \ii MEMO IK. 
 
 country. Early in the autumn he fell into a state of deep 
 depression, partly from the fatigue of great overwork, 1 partly 
 from the loss of very dear friends, and partly from the 
 approach of illness of which he was then unconscious, but of 
 which one premonitory symptom (almost entire sleeplessness) 
 had come upon him. In December he wrote thus : 
 
 " if it was not for this, I think I should long ago have given up 
 
 the strife, and betaken myself to some quiet corner to wait in patience and 
 meekness for what the voice would say. And if it found me an unworthy 
 vessel, I should at least have peace within and peace without. . . . But — 
 I have certain words in my possession which have been given me that they 
 might be said to others, few or many. There is within me the whole 
 terrible sum of throes and woes which made Rebecca, I believe, cry out 
 against her double blessing. I know also that I shall not find peace 
 or rest until I have said my whole say. And yet I cannot do it. And I 
 yearn for things which I see, and which might have been mine, and would 
 have been blessing and sunshine, and the cooling dew to the small germs 
 within me ; — and yet ! and yet ! I know that I ought not to look to the 
 right or to the left ; that I ought to be resigned ; that I ought to fight 
 down manfully every tear that wells up in my lonely heart, and that 
 I ought to look but to the distant stars and work on ; — but I break down 
 occasionally, and I want to know the Reason Why. And if a goodly flame 
 shoots up, there are also so many ashes rolling down besides. And the 
 ashes last longer than the flame — so much longer ! It is not merely 
 the results of hard and tedious dryasdusty investigations which I carry 
 about with me and write into books, but those certain human problems 
 which underlie them and give them tone and colour, and have begotten all 
 those ancient matters, and which are so wondrously like the problems 
 with which we do battle and are worsted. It is the continuity and 
 solidarity of refined mankind which I have in my mind, and the sameness 
 of its achievements, of its loves and hatreds, and prayers and curses, and 
 conceptions of what is good and evil, and godly, positive and negative ; 
 and reflecting upon all this, I find that I have nothing more to say — and 
 ought to lay down a pen, which properly speaking I have never taken up. 
 But all this is so confused and wild. . . . and I cannot take comfort in the 
 thought of death, — I want to live— there is so much life, hot, full life 
 within — that it shrinks from darkness and deadness. I envy those who 
 can fly on the mind's wings to this harbour of refuge ; I cannot follow, but 
 keep tossing outside in my broken craft, through foam, and rock, and 
 mist." 
 
 1 Just at this time he brought out the article on " Islam " in the 
 ' Quarterly Review,' and the letters on the (Ecumenical Council in the Times.
 
 MEMOIR. xill 
 
 And ap-ain : 
 
 " I work hard : but often I am on the brink of giving up. To resusci- 
 tate a time which perhaps after all had better remain dead, is a rash task. 
 "Who knows ? perhaps after all I may be only and really in a dream, while 
 I fancy I see golden towers and palaces gleaming in the dark blue depths, 
 streets and market-places crowded with a motley crew — Roman, Greek, 
 Byzantine, Jewish, Indian, and the rest — hearing the vague, wild hum of 
 strange dead voices, and seeing above all the weird strained look in their 
 eyes which prays and implores unceasingly — Redeem us ! You remember 
 the " Doctor, sind Sie des Teufels ?" with which the captain caught hold 
 of Heine's boots as he was leaning over the ' Schiffsrand,' looking down- 
 wards ! But then he espied Her who had run away from him some 
 hundred years before, and kept hiding down below. Whom am I looking 
 for? And what will it avail anybody when I have proved to ocular 
 demonstration that they had wisdom, and prowess, and honesty, and wit 
 and humour (which is more), and passions and love in those buried days ? 
 For, after all, this is the end of all investigation into history or art : they 
 were even as Ave are. Why therefore not be satisfied with this general 
 result ?" 
 
 And a little later : — 
 
 " For a long time now I have been frozen in every way. There is more 
 struggle, more despair, more yearning, and more of helpless, hopeless, blind 
 and dumb cryiog out, than even you have ever conceived. . . . As I am 
 pondering over the fates of that creed of which I have traced the germs, 
 Islam, and tried to see, to show the man who begot it visibly — as I work 
 on with my metaphysical Talmud-developments, and see how wasted all 
 that grace, and keenness, and catholicity of the minority has been on the 
 majority, and what things of it all have become the heirlooms of 
 ' Humanity,' and what others have been chilled into everlasting monu- 
 ments of ice, seen and marvelled at by a few when the sun rises or sets, 
 but otherwise useless, — as further I contemplated what kind of thing it is 
 under which mankind feels happiest (for there never were such glorious 
 times for the world at large), then my heart grows sad and sadder within 
 me — and I feel what many a braver, stouter heart has felt : the futility of 
 my own self-sacrifice. For it is that. I might be a thousand times more 
 useful to my immediate friends by not giving myself up thus utterly to 
 labours which, taken all in all, will amount to but very, very little, in the 
 long run. I may prove and bring out a few details : I may teach a 
 few — and these generally don't need to be taught this — that man is not 
 bad from beginning, and certainly not because he does not happen to dress 
 and eat quite in the approved fashion. But after all : what is the having 
 done this compared to a real, good, active, useful life, when days mean 
 days, and nights mean nights : a life not a prey to all kinds of haunting 
 things, and one which has a real — not a so-called ideal — aim and 
 purpose ?"
 
 mv MEMOIR. 
 
 In the spring of 1870 the frightful struggle of his 
 naturally robust constitution began against the advancing 
 disease. 
 
 It is not very easy to sketch the character of Mr. Deutsch, 
 but we would fain draw some kind of portrait of him. He 
 was of the Oriental type of Jews: eyes and hair of the 
 darkest, with the flexible, ever-varying, expressive mouth 
 of the Israelite ; a face the reverse of handsome, but one 
 that lighted up under the glow of an enthusiastic nature 
 with a brightness that won the sympathies of the coldest 
 listener. He was very small of stature, but sturdy and 
 strong in make ; and, until the last three years of his life, 
 blessed with robust health and spirits that no work seemed 
 to tire, no trials to exhaust. Unfortunately abundant 
 health often induces entire indifference to the commonest 
 rules of prudence or hygiene. With insatiable thirst for 
 knowledge and vast energy in acquiring it, he lacked only 
 that grand self-control which enables a man to live ; without 
 which the finer the power, the briefer its tenure. Except 
 when induced to dine out, he seldom " found time " to dine at 
 all ; and the few hours of sleep he permitted himself to take 
 wrre insufficient to restore the waste of the day. Possibly 
 he might have struggled through these physical difficulties, 
 had he had rest within ; but his sensitive nature gave him no 
 real repose, and a certain loneliness of heart that frequently 
 hangs round the transplanted Jew, helped to wear out the ap- 
 parently stout material of which he was made. Mr. Deutsch 
 was absolutely free from all sentimentality and mental 
 hysteria: his mind was cast in a manly and cheerful mould: 
 he was brimming over with humour and playfulness which 
 continued almost to the very end ; but with all this, the 
 tinge of melancholy which overshadows nearly all true 
 Orientals, cast a thin veil over him that naturally darkened
 
 MEMOIR. xv 
 
 with the loss of health and the beginning of a terrible 
 disease. Very proud by nature, his circumstances in 
 England made him suffer painfully. He felt his attain- 
 ments to be far beyond his position, and the galling official 
 restrictions, petty rules, and annoying humiliations to which 
 he was subjected, kept him during his last few years in a 
 state of constant irritation, and unquestionably hastened his 
 end. A little more bodily ease and the comforts due to men 
 in the prime of life, no longer schoolboys : a little more 
 freedom from care, and worthy consideration by the high 
 powers of the country he had adopted, bestowed in time, 
 would, without any doubt, have saved to us that mine of 
 exceptional knowledge, that rare combination of gifts whose 
 premature loss we now, too late, deplore. 
 
 Perhaps his chief external characteristic was brightness. 
 As long as health was granted to him, no amount of work or 
 fatigue ever troubled his gaiete de coeur, or dimmed the 
 sparkling brightness of his society. He readily threw him- 
 self into the interests and occupations of others, with helpful 
 hearty kindness, of which many and many reaped the full 
 advantage; for, as his studies had been in some degree 
 peculiar, he was continually applied to for information. 
 Though sensitive to a fault he was not easily offended, but 
 when once he had made a friend it was rare for him to lose 
 him. During the commencement of his illness this sensitive- 
 ness increased upon him, and caused him not only to 
 magnify slights and to fret over them with intense bitterness, 
 but also to fancy them where none were intended. Shrink- 
 ing from all around him, and rigidly determined to bear 
 his pain alone and in secret, he could not be persuaded to 
 see that some motive must be attributed to explain his with- 
 drawal from his friends; and, while he resolutely concealed 
 himself from them, he sorrowed bitterly over their neglect
 
 \\ I 
 
 W.MOIK. 
 
 of liim. But all this was only the not unnatural result of 
 disease and pain, and his heart never wavered in loyalty to 
 t h< ise who had loved, or been true friends to, him. Ambitious 
 he certainly was: but it was not the poor ambition of per- 
 sonal prominence; it was only the ardent aspiration of a 
 noble nature for the attainment of a lofty ideal ; and in the 
 very worst of his sufferings his keenest pang and bitterest 
 trial was the despair of accomplishing the work ho had laid 
 out for himself, — the object of his whole life, and the idol 
 of his heart. 
 
 We have said that he was a proud man. Enjoying a 
 noble pride in his own gifts, he suffered also from the very 
 i< k ilish pride of not confessing to physical weakness. To the 
 very last he kept from all but two or three — not more — of 
 his most intimate friends, even from his daily companions in 
 office, the knowledge of his failure of health. Attacked by a 
 disease 1 that entailed agonies of pain, he yet bore it with a 
 fortitude very rarely equalled: and not only dragged himself 
 to his daily work at the Museum, but endured the terrible 
 tortures arising from the necessarily active life there, with an 
 heroic fortitude that was the unceasing amazement of his sur- 
 geon and nurse. "Without any private means, and frequently 
 denying himself in order to send assistance to the old family 
 at home, giving up work meant living on the kindness of his 
 friends : a suffering more painful to him to endure than his 
 bodily illness; and it was exquisite pain to him to accept 
 enough to carry him at last to the warmer climate he had 
 longed so earnestly when in health to see. Through the 
 one fault, so common in the noblest natures, he was just 
 too proud to be able to take willingly even from those who 
 
 1 Cancer; hut this disease was 
 never suspected during his life, and 
 
 only discovered iu a post-mortem 
 
 examination. lie had been treated 
 for other almost equally painful dis- 
 eases, and endured several operations.
 
 MEMOIR. xvn 
 
 loved him ; he had lived too much alone and in exile to 
 enjoy fully the happiness of being grateful to others for 
 everything. 
 
 It will be readily seen even from this brief sketch what an 
 immeasurable power of industry he possessed. He worked 
 as almost only a German can work. Studying, labouring on 
 all sides, what he acquired was really marvellous. He was 
 extraordinarily well acquainted with English literature in 
 all its varied styles and periods, enjoying it with fine taste 
 and judgment. But his chief study was of Indo-European 
 and Shemitic languages — Sanskrit, Chaldaic, Aramaic, and 
 others. The study of his heart was Phoenician, and had 
 his life been spared he would have concentrated all his 
 energies upon that and Cuneiform. For this study, his un- 
 failing natural accuracy — the backbone of a true scholar — 
 peculiarly adapted him. It was truly said of him, " There 
 is probably no one in England who possesses, to an equal 
 degree, the varied knowledge combined with the intense 
 sympathy for art, nature, and humanity that distinguished 
 the deceased scholar." Neither did " the society which 
 admired him understand the deep thought that underlaid 
 his light sarcasms, the tremendous labour that resulted in his 
 least writings, and the wealth of knowledge of which his 
 chief work showed but a glimpse." 
 
 He had the fervid temperament of a poet, the tender 
 heart of a woman, and a certain simplicity of nature that 
 broke out occasionally as in a child. Intense in everything, 
 he carried out a purity of life that showed no common self- 
 restraint in one so ardent and so warm of heart ; religiously 
 blameless to the last. He was reverent without superstition, 
 and free from prejudice notwithstanding his earnest, pas- 
 sionate attachment to his country and to his people. 
 
 In the autumn of 1872 a despairing longing for warmth 
 
 b
 
 xviii MEMOIR. 
 
 and sunshine came upon hira; "he would die happy if he 
 could only once more hear the hum of the East:" he 
 "almost thought a draught of the Nile would cure the 
 incurable !" Means were found through the kindness of his 
 many friends, and collected unknown to him ; six months' 
 leave was granted by the Trustees of the British Museum : 
 and on the 18th of December he left England with a 
 careful attendant for Italy. 
 
 And Italy seemed to bring him a sort of resurrection ; the 
 Egyptian gallery at Turin was enjoyed with delight : then 
 came " Florence, the Andante to the vast second and third 
 movements of Rome, while Naples was the final Cantabile — 
 if there be such a thing in this symphony of glory, Italy. 
 Verily," he wrote, "I live again, albeit stricken yet, but 
 filled with a great happiness." He could see but little ; 
 but that little he saw with his usual intensity, and fell to 
 copying inscriptions and taking notes as if a new life was 
 going to begin for him. He left Brindisi on the (ith of 
 January, and arrived at Alexandria on the 10th. Unfor- 
 tunately the winter in Egypt was exceptionally damp and 
 cold : Cairo was all in wild confusion, overcrowded with 
 visitors for the Viceroy's fetes on the marriages of his sons 
 and daughters, and no accommodation was possible for an 
 invalid. He wrote of the " piercing cold " under which he 
 was "shivering," and said that the "ray of hope" which 
 had shone so brightly on him in Italy was now almost 
 extinguished ; adding, " I sometimes cannot and will not 
 realise the terrible truth : there is so immensely much of 
 life within me yet, and my will is so savagely strong at 
 times, and there is oh ! so much, so much for me to do in all 
 directions— surely it cannot be that all this is the last 
 flicker ! " 
 
 At length, after many delays, he got a place in a crowded
 
 MEMOIR. Xix , 
 
 steamer, where lie suffered terribly from the dirt and dis- 
 comfort. Yet, although his spirits had now almost com- 
 pletely failed him, he wrote with enjoyment of the passing 
 scenes " on the Nile — palm-groves, black Nubians, pelicans 
 on alternate legs, barren hills fringed with green embroidery, 
 castellated mud dwellings, big sugar-cane stretches : this on 
 both sides. Under me the river rolling its yellow mystic 
 waters, and around me there waves such a stream of life." 
 At Luxsor he found comfortable quarters in the house of 
 the Austrian Consul, from whom he received the utmost 
 kindness. But here he grew rapidly worse, and his 
 strength declined day by day, until he became unable to 
 leave his bed. "Yet all this while," he wrote, in nearly his 
 last letter, " my brain is teeming with work — work that 
 seems cut out as by special primaeval arrangement for me 
 and me only. The tragical irony of my failure of life cuts 
 me to pieces. A whole flood of thoughts old and new — of 
 suggestions, facts, and conceits storm in upon me with every 
 breath I draw here, at every stone I stumble over, at every 
 single sign and token of this boundless tomb-world wherein 
 lie hidden how many civilizations ? the very door of my 
 house is formed out of a mummy-case inscribed with part of 
 the Ritual of the Dead in fading hieroglyphics ! oh, the 
 vast accumulation that has come into my brain from all I 
 see around me ! — alas ! they are but day-dreams now — 
 golden visions wherewith my too vivid imagination beguiles 
 the long drawn-out days and nights of keen distress." 
 
 He got back to Cairo on the 30th of March, but after 
 three weeks of intense suffering removed to the Prussian 
 Deaconesses' Hospital at Alexandria, where a comfortable 
 apartment was provided for him, and where he had the 
 society of one kind friend as well as the careful watching of 
 the good Sisters. He still hoped to reach England again,
 
 xx MEMOIR. 
 
 and bad a berth engaged for him in the P. and 0. steamer 
 for the 7th of May. But when that day came he was already 
 sinking rapidly, and early on the morning of the 12th of 
 May, 187;:, he died. 
 
 " I only wish for peace," were nearly his last words. 
 
 He was buried on the following morning in the Jewish 
 cemetery at Alexandria. 
 
 A stone of polished red granite now covers his last resting- 
 place, bearing four inscriptions. The Hebrew one was 
 written by Dr. Hermann Adler, Rabbi, and is as follows, 
 literally translated : 
 
 Here is entombed the well-beloved — whose heart was burning with 
 good things, and whose pen was the pen of a ready writer — Menahem, 
 son of Abraham Deutsch, whom the Lord preserve ! He was born at 
 Neisse, on the 1st Marheshvan, 5.VJ0 a.m., and departed from this world 
 in Alexandria, on Monday the 9th lyar, in the year 'Arise, shine; for 
 thy light is come.' May his soul be bound up in the bond of life ! 
 
 To explain the quotation here given, it will be remem- 
 bered that every letter in the Hebrew alphabet has its 
 numerical as well as its lingual value; dates are therefore 
 almost always written upon tombstones embodied in some 
 text of Scripture conveying the corresponding numerals in a 
 chrono-grammatic form. In this case the date of Menahem 
 Deutsch's death happens to form the above text from Isaiah 
 lx. 1 — an apt quotation which touchingly describes in the 
 language of his own people that ardent aspiration after 
 light which characterized his whole life. 
 
 The English inscription, literally translated also into 
 Gurman and Arabic, says : 
 
 Here lie the earthly remains 
 
 of tin' beloved 
 
 Emanuel Oscar Menahem Deutsch, 
 
 for eighteen years employed in the British Museum. 
 
 Born at Neisse October 26, 1829. 
 
 Died at Alexandria, May 12, 1873.
 
 I. 
 
 THE TALMUD. 
 
 What is the Talmud ? 
 
 What is the nature of that strange production of which the 
 name, imperceptibly almost, is beginning to take its place 
 among the household words of Europe ? Turn where we may 
 in the realms of modern learning, we seem to be haunted by 
 it. We meet with it in theology, in science, even in general 
 literature, in their highways and in their byeways. There is 
 not a handbook to all or any of the many departments of 
 biblical lore, sacred geography, history, chronology, numis- 
 matics, and the rest, but its pages contain references to the 
 Talmud. The advocates of all religious opinions appeal to 
 its dicta. Nay, not only the scientific investigators of 
 Judaism and Christianity, but those of Mohammedanism 
 and Zoroastrianism, turn to it in their dissections of dogma 
 and legend and ceremony. If, again, we take up any recent 
 volume of archasological or philological transactions, whether 
 we .light on a dissertation on a Phoenician altar, or a 
 cuneiform tablet, Babylonian weights, or Sassanian coins, we 
 are certain to find this mysterious word. Nor is it merely 
 the restorers of the lost idioms of Canaan and Assyria, of 
 Himyar and Zoroastrian Persia, that appeal to the Talmud 
 for assistance ; but the modern schools of Greek and Latin 
 philology are beginning to avail themselves of the classical 
 and postclassical materials that lie scattered through it. 
 Jurisprudence, in its turn, has been roused to the fact that, 
 apart from the bearing of the Talmud on the study of the 
 Pandects and the Institutes, there are also some of those 
 very laws of the Medes and Persians — hitherto but a vague 
 
 1 This article' appeared in the ' Quarterly Review ' for Octoler, 1SG7, 
 vol. cxxiii., No. 24b*. 
 
 B
 
 2 THE TALMUD. 
 
 sound — hidden away in its labyrinths. And so too with 
 medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and the rest. The 
 history of these sciences, during that period over which the 
 composition of the Talmud ranges — and it ranges over about 
 a thousand years — can no longer be written without some 
 reference to the items preserved, as in a vast buried city, in 
 this cyclopean work. Yet, apart from the facts that belong 
 emphatically to these respective branches, it contains other 
 facts, of larger moment still: facts bearing upon human 
 culture in its widest sense. Day by day there are excavated 
 from these mounds pictures of many countries and many 
 periods. Pictures of Hellas and Byzantium, Egypt and 
 Rome, Persia and Palestine ; of the temple and the forum, 
 war and peace, joy and mourning; pictures teeming with 
 life, glowing with colour. 
 
 These are, indeed, signs of the times. A mighty change 
 has come over us. We, children of this latter age, are, 
 above all things, utilitarian. We do not read the Koran, 
 the Zend Avesta, the Vedas, with the sole view of refuting 
 them. We look upon all literature, religious, legal, and 
 otherwise, whensoever and wheresoever produced, as part 
 and parcel of humanity. We, in a manner, feel a kind of 
 responsibility for it. We seek to understand the phase of 
 culture which begot these items of our inheritance, the spirit 
 that moves upon their face. And while we bury that which 
 is dead in them, we rejoice in that which lives in them. We 
 enrich our stores of knowledge from theirs, we are stirred 
 by their poetry, we are moved to high and holy thoughts 
 when they touch the divine chord in our hearts. 
 
 In the same human spirit we now speak of the Talmud. 
 There is even danger at hand that this chivalresque feeling — 
 one of the most touching characteristics of our times — which 
 is evermore prompting us to offer holocausts to the Manes of 
 those whom former generations are thought to have wronged, 
 may lead to its being extolled somewhat beyond its merit. 
 As these ever new testimonies to its value crowd upon us, 
 we might be led into exaggerating its importance for the 
 history of mankind. Yet an old adage of its own says :
 
 THE TALMUD. 3 
 
 "Above all things, study. "Whether for the sake of learning 
 or for any other reason, study. For, whatever the motives 
 that impel you at first, you will very soon love study for its 
 own sake." And thus even exaggerated expectations of the 
 treasure-trove in the Talmud will have their value, if they 
 lead to the study of the work itself. 
 
 For, let us say it at once, these tokens of its existence, 
 that appear in many a new publication, are, for the most 
 part, but will-o'-the-wisps. At first sight one would fancy 
 that there never was a book more popular, or that formed 
 more exclusively the mental centre of modern scholars, 
 Orientalists, theologians, or jurists. What is the real truth ? 
 Paradoxical as it may seem, there never was a book at once 
 more universally neglected and more universally talked of. 
 Well may we forgive Heine, when we read the glowing- 
 description of the Talmud contained in his " Romancero," 
 for never having even seen the subject of his panegyrics. Like 
 his countryman Schiller, who, pining vainly for one glimpse 
 of the Alps, produced the most glowing and faithful picture 
 of them, so he, with the poet's unerring instinct, gathered 
 truth from hearsay and description. But how many of these 
 ubiquitous learned quotations really flow from the fountain- 
 head ? Too often and too palpably it is merely — to use 
 Samson's agricultural simile — those ancient and well-worked 
 heifers, the "Tela ignea Satanoe," the "Abgezogener 
 Schlangenbalg," and all their venomous kindred, which are 
 once more being dragged to the plough by some of the 
 learned. We say the learned : for as to the people at large, 
 often as they hear the word now, we firmly believe that 
 numbers of them still hold, with that erudite Capucin friar, 
 Henricus Seynensis, that the Talmud is not a book, but a man. 
 « Ut narrat Rabbinus Talmud "—"As says Rabbi Talmud "— 
 cries he, and triumphantly clinches his argument ! 
 
 And of those who know that it is not a Rabbi, how many 
 are there to whom it conveys any but the vaguest of notions ? 
 Who wrote it ? What is its bulk ? Its date ? Its contents ? 
 Its birthplace ? A contemporary lately called it " a sphinx, 
 towards which all men's eyes are directed at this hour, some 
 
 b 2
 
 4 THE TALMUD. 
 
 with eager curiosity, some with vague anxiety."' But why 
 not force open its lips ? How much longer are we to live by 
 quotations alone, quotations a thousand times used, a 
 thousand times abused ? 
 
 Where, however, are we to look even for primary instruc- 
 tion? Where learn the story of the book, its place in 
 literature, its meaning and purport, and, above all, its 
 relation to ourselves ? 
 
 If we turn to the time-honoured " Authorities," we shall 
 mostly find that, in their eagerness to serve some cause, they 
 have torn a few pieces off that gigantic living body ; and 
 they have presented to us these ghastly anatomical prepara- 
 tions, twisted and mutilated out of all shape and semblance, 
 saying, Behold, this is the book ! Or they have done worse. 
 They have not garbled their samples, but have given them 
 exactly as they found them ; and then stood aside, pointing 
 at them with jeering countenance. For their samples were 
 ludicrous and grotesque beyond expression. But these wise 
 and pious investigators unfortunately mistook the gurgoyles, 
 those grinning stone caricatures that mount their thousand 
 years' guard over our cathedrals, for the gleaming statues of 
 ,the Saints within ; and, holding them up to mockery and 
 derision, they cried, These be thy gods, Israel ! 
 
 Let us not be misunderstood. When we complain of 
 the lack of guides to the Talmud, we do not wish to be 
 ungrateful to those great and earnest scholars whose names 
 are familiar to every student, and whose labours have been 
 ever present to our mind. For, though in the whole realm 
 of learning there is scarcely a single branch of study to be 
 compared for its difficulty to the Talmud, yet, if a man 
 had time, and patience, and knowledge, there is absolutely 
 no reason why he should not, up and down ancient and 
 modern libraries, gather most excellent hints from essays and 
 treatises, monographs and sketches, in books and periodicals 
 without number, by dint of which, aided by the study of the 
 work itself, he might arrive at some conclusion as to its 
 essence and tendencies, its origin and its development. Yet, 
 so far as we know, that work, every step of which, it must be
 
 THE TALMUD. 5 
 
 confessed, is beset with fatal pitfalls, has not yet been done 
 for the world at large. It is for a very good reason that we 
 have placed nothing but the name of the Talmud itself at 
 the head of our paper. We have sought far and near for 
 some one special book on the subject, which we might make 
 the theme of our observations — a book which should not 
 merely be a garbled translation of a certain twelfth century 
 " Introduction," interspersed with vituperations and sup- 
 plemented with blunders, but which from the platform of 
 modern culture should pronounce impartially upon a pro- 
 duction which, if for no other reason, claims respect through 
 its age, — a book that would lead us through the stupendous 
 labyrinths of fact, and thought, and fancy, of which the 
 Talmud consists, that would rejoice even in hieroglyphical 
 fairy-lore, in abstruse propositions and syllogisms, that could 
 forgive wild outbursts of passion, and not judge harshly and 
 hastily of things, the real meaning of which may have had 
 to be hidden under the fool's cap and bells. 
 
 We have not found such a book, nor anything approaching 
 to it. But closely connected with that circumstance is this 
 other, that we were fain to quote the first editions of this 
 Talmud, though scores have been printed since, and about a 
 dozen are in the press at this very moment. Even this first 
 edition was printed in hot haste, and without due care ; and 
 every succeeding one, with one or two insignificant excep- 
 tions, presents a sadder spectacle. In the Basle edition 
 of 1578 — the third in point of time, which has remained the 
 standard edition almost ever since — that amazing creature, 
 the Censor, stepped in. In his anxiety to protect the 
 " Faith " from all and every danger — for the Talmud 
 was supposed to hide bitter things against Christianity under 
 the most innocent-looking words and phrases — this official 
 did very wonderful things. When he, for example, found 
 some ancient Roman in the book swearing by the Capitol or 
 by Jupiter "of Borne," his mind instantly misgave him. 
 Surely this Boman must be a Christian, the Capitol the 
 Vatican, Jupiter the Pope. And forthwith he struck out 
 Borne and substituted any other place he could think of. A
 
 THE TALMUD. 
 
 favourite spot seems to have been Persia, sometimes it was 
 Aram or Babel. So that this worthy Roman may be found 
 unto this day swearing by the Capitol of Persia or by the 
 Jupiter of Aram and Babel. But whenever the word 
 " Gentile " occurred, the Censor was seized with the most 
 frantic terrors. A " Gentile " could not possibly be aught but 
 a Christian ; whether he lived in India or in Athens, in 
 Rome or in Canaan ; whether he was a good Gentile — and 
 there are many such in the Talmud — or a wicked one. 
 Instantly he christened him ; and christened him, as fancy 
 moved him, an " Egyptian," an " Aramaean," an " Amalekite," 
 an "Arab," a "Negro;" sometimes a whole "people." We 
 are speaking strictly to the letter. All this is extant in our 
 very last editions. 
 
 Once or twice attempts were made to clear the text from 
 its foulest blemishes. There was even, about two years ago, 
 a beginning made of a " critical " edition, such as not merely 
 Greek and Roman, Sanscrit and Persian classics, but the 
 veriest trash written in those languages would have had ever 
 so long ago. And there is — M. Renan's unfortunate remark 
 to the contrary notwithstanding 1 — no lack of Talmudical 
 MSS., however fragmentary they be for the most part. 
 There are innumerable variations, additions, and corrections 
 to be gleaned from the Codices at the Bodleian and the 
 Vatican, in the Libraries of Odessa, Munich, and Florence, 
 Hamburg and Heidelberg, Paris and Parma. But an evil 
 eye seems to be upon this book. This corrected edition 
 remains a torso, like the two first volumes of translations of 
 the Talmud, commenced at different periods, the second 
 volumes of which never saw the light. It therefore seemed 
 advisable to refer to the Editio Princeps, as the one that 
 is at least free from the blemishes, censorial or typographical, 
 of later ages. 
 
 Well does the Talmud supplement the Horatian " Habent 
 sua fata libelli," by the words " even the sacred scrolls in the 
 
 1 "On suit qu'il no rcste aucun manuscrit du Talmud pour contrulo 
 Ioj editions imprimees." — Lea Apotres, p. 262.
 
 THE TALMUD. 7 
 
 Tabernacle." We really do not wonder that the good 
 Capucin of whom we spoke mistook it for a man. Ever 
 since it existed — almost before it existed in a palpable 
 shape — it has been treated much like a human being. It 
 has been proscribed, and imprisoned, and burnt, a hundred 
 times over. From Justinian, who, as early as 553 A.D., 
 honoured it by a special interdictory Novella, 1 down to 
 Clement VIII. and later — a space of over a thousand years — 
 both the secular and the spiritual powers, kings and emperors, 
 popes and anti-popes, vied with each other in hurling 
 anathemas and bulls and edicts of wholesale confiscation and 
 conflagration against this luckless book. Thus, within a 
 period of less than fifty years — and these forming the latter 
 half of the sixteenth century — it Avas publicly burnt no less 
 than six different times, and that not in single copies, but 
 wholesale, by the waggon-load. Julius III. issued his 
 proclamation against what he grotesquely calls the " Gema- 
 roth Thalmud," in 1553 and 1555, Paul IV. in 1559, Pius V. 
 in 1566, Clement VIII. in 1592 and 1599. The fear of 
 it was great indeed. Even Pius IV., in giving permission 
 for a new edition, stipulated expressly that it should appear 
 without the name Talmud. " Si tamen prodierit sine nomine 
 Thalmud tolerari deberet." It almost seems to have been a 
 kind of Shibboleth, by which every new potentate had to 
 prove the rigour of his faith. And very rigorous it must 
 have been, to judge by the language which even the highest 
 dignitaries of the Church did not disdain to use at times. 
 Thus Honorius IV. writes to the Archbishop of Canterbury 
 in 1286 anent that " damnable book " (liber damnabilis), 
 admonishing him gravely and desiring him " vehemently " 
 to see that it be not read by anybody, since " all other evils 
 flow out of it." — Verily these documents are sad reading, 
 only relieved occasionally by some wild blunder that lights 
 up as with one flash the abyss of ignorance regarding this 
 object of wrath. 
 
 We remember but one sensible exception in this Babel of 
 
 1 Novella 146, Uep\ 'E$paiwi> (addressed to the Praifectus Pnetorio 
 Areobiudus).
 
 8 THE TALMUD. 
 
 manifestoes. Clement V., in 1307, before condemning the 
 book, wished to know something of it, and there was no one 
 to tell him. Whereupon he proposed — but in language so 
 obscure that it left the door open for many interpretations — 
 that three chairs be founded, for Hebrew, Chaldee, and 
 Arabic, as the three tongues nearest to the idiom of the 
 Talmud. The spots chosen by him were the Universities of 
 Paris, Salamanca, Bologna, and Oxford. In time, he hoped, 
 one of these Universities might be able to produce a transla- 
 tion of this mysterious book. Need we say that this con- 
 summation never came to pass ? The more expeditious 
 process of destruction was resorted to again and again and 
 again, not merely in the single cities of Italy and France, 
 but throughout the entire Holy Roman Empire. 
 
 At length a change took place in Germany. One Pfeft'er- 
 korn, a miserable creature enough, began, in the time of the 
 Emperor Maximilian, to agitate for a new decree for the 
 extermination of the Talmud. The Emperor lay with his 
 hosts before Pavia, when the evil-tongued messenger arrived 
 in the camp, furnished with goodly letters by Ivunigunde, 
 the Emperor's beautiful sister. Maximilian, wearied and 
 unsuspecting, renewed that time-honoured decree for a 
 confiscation, to be duly followed by a conflagration, readily 
 enough. The confiscation was conscientiously carried out, 
 for Pfefferkorn knew well enough where his former co- 
 religionists kept their books. But a conflagration of a very 
 different kind ensued. Step by step, hour by hour, the 
 German Reformation was drawing nearer. Reuchlin, the 
 most eminent Hellenist and Hebraist of his time, had been 
 nominated to sit on the Committee which was to lend its 
 learned authority to the Emperor's decree. But he did not 
 relish this task. "He did not like the look of Pfefferkorn," 
 he says. Besides which, he was a learned and an honest 
 man, and, having been the restorer of classical Greek in 
 Germany, he did not care to participate in the wholesale 
 murder of a book " written by Christ's nearest relations.'' 
 Perhaps he saw the cunningly-laid trap. He had Joug been 
 a thorn in the flesh of many of his contemporaries. His
 
 THE TALMUD. 9 
 
 Hebrew labours bad been looked upon with bitter jealousy, 
 if not fear. Nothing less was conteinplated in those days — 
 the theological Faculty of Mayence demanded it openly — 
 than a total " Eevision and Correction " of the Hebrew 
 Bible, " inasmuch as it differed from the Vulgate." Eeuch- 
 lin, on his part, never lost an opportunity of proclaiming the 
 high importance of the " Hebrew Truth," as he emphatically 
 called it. His enemies thought that one of two things would 
 follow. By officially pronouncing upon the Talmud, he was 
 sure either to commit himself dangerously — and then a 
 speedy end would be made of him — or to set at naught, to a 
 certain extent, his own previous judgments in favour of these 
 studies. He declined the proposal, saying, honestly enough, 
 that he knew nothing of the book, and that he was not aware 
 of the existence of many who knew anything of it. Least of 
 all did its detractors know it. But, he continued, even if it 
 should contain attacks on Christianity, would it not be 
 preferable to reply to them ? ' : Burning is but a ruffianly 
 argument {Bacchanten- Argument) ." Whereupon a wild out- 
 cry was raised against him as a Jew, a Judaizer, a bribed 
 renegade, and so on. Reuchlin, nothing daunted, set to 
 work upon the book in his patient hard-working manner. 
 Next he wrote a brilliant defence of it. When the Emperor 
 asked his opinion, he repeated Clement's proposal to found 
 Talmudical chairs. At each German university there should 
 be two professors, specially appointed for the sole purpose of 
 enabling students to become acquainted with this book. 
 " As to burning it," he continues, in the famous Memorial 
 addressed to the Emperor, "if some fool came and said, Most 
 mighty Emperor ! your Majesty should really suppress and 
 burn the books of alchymy [a fine argumentum ad homineni\ 
 because they contain blasphemous, wicked, and absurd things 
 against our faith, what should his Imperial Majesty reply to 
 such a buffalo or ass but this : Thou art a ninny, rather to be 
 laughed at than followed? Now because his feeble head 
 cannot enter into the depths of a science, and cannot 
 conceive it, and does understand things otherwise than they 
 really are, would you deem it fit to burn such books ?"
 
 10 THE TALMUD. 
 
 Fiercer and fiercer waxed the howl, and Keuchlin, the 
 peaceful student, from a witness became a delinquent. 
 What he suffered for and through the Talmud cannot be 
 told here. Far and w ide, all over Europe, the contest raged. 
 A whole literature of pamphlets, flying sheets, caricatures, 
 sprang up. University after university was appealed to 
 against him. No less than forty-seven sittings were held 
 by the theological Faculty of Paris, which ended by their 
 formal condemnation of Keuchlin. But he was not left 
 to fight alone. Around him rallied, one by one, Duke 
 Ulrich of Wurtemberg, the Elector Frederick of Saxony, 
 Ulrich von Hutten, Franz von Sickingen — he who finally 
 made the Colognians pay their costs in the Keuchlin trial — 
 Erasmus of llotterdam, and that whole brilliant phalanx of 
 the '"Knights of the Holy Ghost," the " Hosts of Pallas 
 Athene," the " Tahnutpliili," as the documents of the period 
 variously style them : they whom we call the Humanists. 
 
 And their palladium and their war-cry was — oh ! won- 
 drous Avays of History — the Talmud ! To stand up for 
 Keuchlin meant, to them, to stand up for "the Law;" to 
 fight for the Talmud was to fight for the Church! " Non te," 
 writes Egidio de Viterbo to Keuchlin, " sed Legem : non 
 Thalmud, sed Ecdesiam /" 
 
 The rest of the story is written in the " Epistolse Obscuro- 
 rum Virorum," and in the early pages of the German 
 Reformation. The Talmud was not burnt this time. On 
 the contrary, its first complete edition was printed. And in 
 that same year of Grace 1520 a.d., when this first edition 
 went through the press at Venice, Martin Luther burnt the 
 Pope's bull at Wittenberg. 
 
 What is the Talmud ? 
 
 Again the question rises before us in its whole formidable 
 shape; a question which no one has yet answered satis- 
 factorily. And we labour in this place under more than 
 one disadvantage. For, quite apart from the difficulties 
 of explaining a work so utterly Eastern, antique, and 
 thoroughly sui generis, to our modern Western readers, in
 
 THE TALMUD. H 
 
 tlie space of a few pages, we labour under the further 
 disability of not being able to refer to the work itself. 
 Would it not indeed be mere affectation to presuppose more 
 than the vaguest acquaintance with its language or even its 
 name in many of our readers ? And while we would fain 
 enlarge upon such points as a comparison between the 
 law laid down in it with ours, or with the contemporary 
 Greek, Roman, and Persian laws, or those of Islam, or even 
 with its own fundamental Code, the Mosaic : while we would 
 trace a number of its ethical, ceremonial, and doctrinal 
 points in Zoroastrianism, in Christianity, in Mohammedan- 
 ism ; a vast deal of its metaphysics and philosophy in Plato, 
 Aristotle, the Pythagoreans, the Neoplatonists, and the 
 Gnostics — not to mention Spinoza and the Schellings of our 
 own day ; much of its medicine in Hippocrates and Galen, 
 and the Paracelsuses of but a few centuries ago — we shall 
 scarcely be able to do more than to lay a few disjecta 
 membra of these things before our readers. We cannot even 
 sketch, in all its bearings, that singular mental movement 
 which caused the best spirits of an entire nation to con- 
 centrate, in spite of opposition, all their energies for a 
 thousand years upon the writing, and for another thousand 
 years upon the commenting, of this one book. Omitting 
 all detail, which it has cost much to gather, and more to 
 suppress, we shall merely tell of its development, of the 
 schools in which it grew, of the tribunals which judged by it, 
 of some of the men that set their seal on it. We shall also 
 introduce a summary of its law, speak of its metaphysics, 
 of its moral philosophy, and quote many of its proverbs and 
 saws — the truest of all gauges of a time. 
 
 We shall, perhaps, be obliged occasionally to appeal to 
 some of the extraneous topics just mentioned. The Talmud, 
 like every other phenomenon, in order to become compre- 
 hensible, should be considered only in connection with things 
 of a similar kind : a fact almost entirely overlooked to this 
 day. Being emphatically a Corpus Juris, an encyclopaedia of 
 law, civil and penal, ecclesiastical and international, human 
 and divine, it may best be judged by analogy and com-
 
 12 THE TALMUD. 
 
 parison with other legal codes, more especially with the 
 .histinian Code and its Commentaries. What the uninitiated 
 have taken for exceptional " llabbinical " subtleties, or, in 
 matters relating to the sexes, for gross offences against 
 modern taste, will then cause the Talmud to stand rather 
 favourably than otherwise. The Pandects and the Institutes, 
 the Novelise and the Responsa Prudentium should thus be 
 constantly consulted and compared. No less should our 
 English law, as laid down in Blackstone, •wherein we may see 
 how the most varied views of right and wrong have been 
 finally blended and harmonised with the spirit of our times. 
 But the Talmud is more than a book of laws. It is a micro- 
 cosm, embracing, even as does the Bible, heaven and earth. 
 It is as if all the prose and the poetry, the science, the faith 
 and speculation of the Old World were, though only in faint 
 reflections, bound up in it in nuce. Comprising the time 
 from the rise to the fall of antiquity, and a good deal of its 
 after-glow, the history and culture of antiquity have to be 
 considered in their various stages. But, above all, it is neces- 
 sary to transport ourselves, following Goethe's advice, to its 
 birthplace — Palestine and Babylon — the gorgeous East itself, 
 where all things glow in brighter colours, and grow into 
 more fantastic shapes : — 
 
 ' ; Willst den Dlchter du verstehen, 
 Musst in Dichtcr's Lande gelion." 
 
 The origin of the Talmud is coeval with the return from 
 the Babylonish captivity. One of the most mysterious and 
 momentous periods in the history of humanity is that brief 
 space of the Exile. What were the influences brought to 
 bear upon the captives during that time, we know not. But 
 this we know, that from a reckless, lawless, godless populace, 
 they returned transformed into a baud of Puritans. The 
 religion of Zerdusht, though it has left its traces in Judaism, 
 fails to account for that change. Nor does the Exile itself 
 account for it. Many and intense as are the reminiscences 
 of its bitterness, and of yearning for home, that have survived 
 in prayer and in song, yet we know that when the hour of
 
 THE TALMUD. 13 
 
 liberty struck, the forced colonists were loth to return to the 
 land of their fathers. Yet the change is there, palpable, 
 unrnistakeable — a change which we may regard as almost 
 miraculous. Scarcely aware before of the existence of their 
 glorious national literature, the people now began to press 
 Tound these brands plucked from the fire — the scanty records 
 of their faith and history — with a fierce and passionate love, 
 a love stronger even than that of wife and child. These 
 same documents, as they were gradually formed into a canon, 
 became the immutable centre of their lives, their actions, 
 their thoughts, their very dreams. From that time forth, 
 with scarcely any intermission, the keenest as well as the 
 most poetical minds of the nation remained fixed upon them. 
 •" Turn it and turn it again," says the Talmud, with regard 
 to the Bible, " for everything is in it." " Search the Scrip- 
 tures," is the distinct utterance of the New Testament. 
 
 The natural consequence ensued. Gradually, imperceptibly 
 almost, from a mere expounding and investigation for pur- 
 poses of edification or instruction on some special point, this 
 activity begot a science, a science that assumed the very 
 widest dimensions. Its technical name is already contained 
 in the Book of Chronicles. It is " Midrash " (from darash, 
 to study, expound) — a term which the Authorised Version 
 renders by '*Story." l 
 
 There is scarcely a more fruitful source of misconceptions 
 upon this subject than the liquid nature, so to speak, of its 
 technical terms. They mean anything and everything, at 
 once most general and most special. Nearly all of them 
 signify in the first instance simply " study." Next they are 
 used for some one very special branch of this study. Then 
 they indicate, at times a peculiar method, at others the 
 works which have grown out of these either general or special 
 mental labours. Thus Midrash, from the abstract " expound- 
 ing," came to be applied, first to the " exposition " itself — even 
 as our terms " work, investigation, enquiry," imply both pro- 
 cess and product ; and finally, as a special branch of exposition 
 
 1 See 2 Clirou. xiii. 22, xxiv. 27.
 
 14 THE TALMUD. 
 
 — the legendary — was more popular than the rest, to this one 
 branch only and to the books that chiefly represented it. 
 
 For there had sprung up almost innumerable modes of 
 " searching the Scriptures." In the quaintly ingenious manner 
 of the times, four of the chief methods were found in the 
 Persian word Paradise, spelt in vowelless Semitic fashion, 
 PRDS. Each one of these mysterious letters was taken, 
 mnemonically, as the initial of some technical word that 
 indicated one of these four methods. The one called P 
 [peshat] aimed at the simple understanding of words and 
 things, in accordance with the primary exegetical law of the 
 Talmud, "that no verse of the scripture ever practically 
 travelled beyond its literal meaning" — though it might be 
 explained, homiletically and otherwise, in innumerable new 
 ways. The second, R [remes], means Hint, i.e. the discovery 
 of the indications contained in certain seemingly superfluous 
 letters and signs in Scripture. These were taken to refer to 
 laws not distinctly mentioned, but either existing traditionally 
 or newly promulgated. This method, when more generally 
 applied, begot a kind of memoria technica, a stenographv 
 akin to the " Notarikon " of the Romans. Points and notes 
 were added to the margins of scriptural MSS., and the 
 foundation of the Massorah, or diplomatic preservation of the 
 text, was thus laid. The third, D [derush], was homiletic 
 application of that which had been to that which was and 
 would be of prophetical and historical dicta to the actual 
 condition of things. It was a peculiar kind of sermon, with 
 all the aids of dialectics and poetry, of parable, gnome, 
 proverb, legend, and the rest, exactly as we find it in the 
 New Testament. The fourth, S, stood for sod, secret, mystery. 
 This was the Secret Science, into which but few were in- 
 itiated. It was theosophy, metaphysics, angelology, a host 
 of wild and glowing visions of things beyond earth. Faint 
 echoes of this science survive in Neoplatonism, in Gnosticism, 
 in the Kabbalah, in " Hermes Trismegistus." But few were 
 initiated into these things of " The Creation " and of " The 
 Chariot," as it was also called, in allusion to Ezekiel's 
 vision. Yet here again the power of the vague and myste-
 
 THE TALMUD. 15 
 
 rious was so strong, that the word Paradise gradually 
 indicated this last branch, the secret science only. Later, in 
 Gnosticism, it came to mean the " Spiritual Christ." 
 
 There is a weird story in the Talmud, which has given rise 
 to the wildest explanations, but which will become intel- 
 ligible by the foregoing lines. " Four men," it says, " entered 
 Paradise. One beheld and died. One beheld and lost his 
 senses. One destroyed the young plants. One only entered 
 in peace and came out in peace." — The names of all four are 
 given. They are all exalted masters of the law. The last 
 but one, he who destroyed the young plants, is Elisha ben 
 Abuyah, the Faust of the Talmud, who, while sitting in the 
 academy, at the feet of his teachers, to study the law, kept 
 the " profane books " — of " Homeros," to wit, hidden in his 
 garment, and from whose mouth " Greek song " never ceased 
 to flow. How he, notwithstanding his early scepticism, 
 rapidly rises to eminence in that same law,'' finally falls away 
 and becomes a traitor and an outcast, and his very name a 
 thing of unutterable horror — how, one day (it was the great 
 day of atonement) he passes the ruins of the temple, and 
 hears a voice within "murmuring like a dove" — "all men 
 shall be forgiven this day save Elisha ben Abuyah, who, know- 
 ing me, has betrayed me " — how, after his death the flames 
 will not cease to hover over his grave, until his one faithful 
 disciple, the " Light of the Law," Meir, throws himself over 
 it, swearing a holy oath that he will not partake of the joys 
 of the world to come without his beloved master, and that he 
 will not move from that spot until his master's soul shall 
 have found grace and salvation before the Throne of Mercy — 
 all this and a number of other incidents form one of the 
 most stirring poetical pictures of the whole Talmud. The 
 last of the four is Akiba, the most exalted, most romantic, 
 and most heroic character perhaps in that vast gallery of the 
 learned of his time ; he who, in the last revolt under Trajan 
 and Hadrian, expiated his patriotic rashness at the hands of 
 the Roman executioners, and — the legend adds — whose soul 
 fled just when, in his last agony, his mouth cried out the last
 
 1G THE TALMUD. 
 
 word of the confession of God's unity: — "Hoar, O Israel, the 
 Lord our God is One." 
 
 The Talmud is the storehouse of " Midrash," in its widest 
 sense, and in all its branches. What we said of the fluctua- 
 tion of terms applies emphatically also to this word Talmud. 
 It means in the first instance nothing but " study," " learn- 
 ing," from lamad, to learn ; next indicating a special method 
 of " learning" or rather arguing, it finally became the name 
 of the great Corpus Juris of Judaism. 
 
 When we speak of the Talmud as a legal code, we trust we 
 shall not be understood too literally. It resembles about as 
 much what we generally understand by that name as a 
 primeval forest resembles a Dutch garden. 
 
 Nothing indeed can equal the state of utter amazement 
 into which the modern investigator finds himself plunged at 
 the first sight of these luxuriant Talmudieal wildernesses. 
 Schooled in the harmonising, methodising systems of the 
 West — systems that condense, and arrange, and classify, and 
 give everything its fitting place and its fitting position in 
 that place — he feels almost stupefied here. The language, 
 the style, the method, the very sequence of things (a sequence 
 that often appears as logical as our dreams), the amazingly 
 varied nature of these things — everything seems tangled, 
 confused, chaotic. It is only after a time that the student 
 learns to distinguish between two mighty currents in the 
 book — currents that at times flow parallel, at times seem to 
 work upon each other, and to impede each other's action : 
 the one emanating from the brain, the other from the heart 
 — the one prose, the other poetry — the one carrying with it 
 all those mental faculties that manifest themselves in arguing, 
 investigating, comparing, developing, bringing a thousand 
 poiuts to bear upon one and one upon a thousand ; the other 
 springing from the realms of fancy, of imagination, feeling, 
 humour, and above all from that precious combination of 
 still, almost sad, pensiveness with quick catholic sympathies, 
 which in German is called Gemilth. These two currents the 
 Midrash, in its various aspects, had caused to set in the
 
 THE TALMUD. 17 
 
 direction of the Bible, and they soon found in it two vast 
 fields for the display of all their power and energy. The 
 logical faculties turned to the legal portions in Exodus, 
 Leviticus, Deuteronomy — developing, seeking, and solving a 
 thousand real or apparent difficulties and contradictions with 
 Avhat, as tradition, had been living in the hearts and mouths 
 of the people from time immemorial. The other — the imagi- 
 native faculties — -took possession of the prophetical, ethical, 
 historical, and, quaintly enough, sometimes even of the legal 
 portions of the Bible, and transformed the whole into a vast 
 series of themes almost musical in their wonderful and 
 capricious variations. The first-named is called " Halachah " 
 (Rule, Norm), a term applied both to the process of evolving 
 legal enactments and the enactments themselves. The other, 
 "Haggadah" (Legend, Saga) not so much in our modern 
 sense of the word, though a great part of its contents comes 
 under that head, but because it was only a " saying," a thing 
 without authority, a play of fancy, an allegory, a parable, a 
 tale, that pointed a moral and illustrated a question, that 
 smoothed the billows of fierce debate, roused the slumbering 
 attention, and was generally — to use its own phrase — a 
 tl comfort and a blessing." 
 
 The Talmud, which is composed of these two elements, 
 the legal and the legendary, is divided into Mishnah and 
 Gemara : two terms again of uncertain, shifting 1 meaning 
 Originally indicating, like the technical words mentioned 
 already, " study," they both became terms for special studies, 
 and indicated special works. The Mishnah, from shanah 
 (tana), to learn, to repeat, has been of old translated Sevre- 
 pooais, second law. But this derivation, correct as it seems 
 literally, is incorrect in the first instance. It simply means 
 " Learning," like Gemara, which, besides, indicates " comple- 
 ment " to the Mishnah — itself a complement to the Mosaic 
 code, but in such a manner that in developing and enlarging, 
 it supersedes it. The Mishnah, on its own part again, forms 
 a kind of text to which the Gemara is not so much a scholion 
 as a critical expansion. The Pentateuch remains in all cases 
 the background and latent source of the Mishnah. But it is 
 
 c
 
 18 THE TALMUD. 
 
 the business of the Gemara'to examine into the legitimacy 
 and correctness of this Mishnic development in single in- 
 stances. The Pentateuch remained under all circumstances 
 the immutable, divinely given constitution, the icrilten law : 
 in contradistinction to it, the Mishnah, together with the 
 Gernara, was called the oral, or " Unwritten" law, not unlike 
 the unwritten Greek 'F/jrpai, the Boinan " Lex Non Scripta," 
 the Snnnah, or our own common law. 
 
 There are few chapters in the whole History of Juris- 
 prudence more obscure than the origin, development, and 
 completion of this " Oral Law." There must have existed 
 from the very beginning of the Mosaic law a number of 
 corollary laws, which explained in detail most of the rules 
 broadly laid down in it. Apart from these, it was but natural 
 that the enactments of that primitive Council of the Desert, 
 the Elders, and their successors in each period, together with 
 the verdicts issued by the later "judges within the gates," 
 to whom the Pentateuch distinctly refers, should have be- 
 come precedents, and been handed down as such. Apocryphal 
 writings — notably the fourth book of Ezra — not to mention 
 Philo and the Church Fathers, speak of fabulous numbers of 
 books that had been given to Moses together with the Penta- 
 teuch : thus indicating the common belief in the divine 
 origin of the supplementary laws that had existed among the 
 people from time immemorial. Jewish tradition traces the 
 bulk of the oral injunctions, through a chain of distinctly- 
 named authorities, to " Sinai " itself. It mentions in detail 
 how Moses communicated those minutiae of his legislation, in 
 which he had been instructed during the mysterious forty 
 days and nights on the Mount, to the chosen guides of the 
 people, in such a manner that they should for ever remain 
 engraven on the tablets of their hearts. 
 
 A long space intervenes between the Mosaic period and 
 that of the Mishnah. The ever growing wants of the ever 
 disturbed commonwealth necessitated new laws and regula- 
 tions at every turn. A difficulty, however, arose, unknown 
 to other legislations. In despotic states a decree is issued, 
 promulgating the new law. In constitutional states a Bill is
 
 THE TALMUD. 19 
 
 brought in. The supreme authority, if it finds it meet and 
 right to make this new law, makes it. The ease was different 
 in the Jewish commonwealth of the post-exilian times. 
 Among the things that were irredeemably lost with the first 
 temple were the " Urim and Thummim " of the high-priest 
 — the oracle. With Malachi the last prophet had died. 
 Both for the promulgation of a new law and the abrogation 
 of an old one, a higher sanction was requisite than a mere 
 majority of the legislative council. The new act must be 
 proved, directly or indirectly, from the " Word of God " — 
 proved to have been promulgated by the Supreme King — 
 hidden and bound up, as it were, in its very letters from the 
 beginning. This was not easy in all cases ; especially when 
 a certain number of hermeneutical rules, not unlike those 
 used in the Eoman schools (inferences, conclusions from the 
 minor to the major and vice versa, analogies of ideas or 
 objects, general and special statements, &c), had come to be 
 laid down. 
 
 Apart from the new laws requisite at sudden emergencies, 
 there were many of those old traditional ones, for which the 
 point d'cvppui had to be found, when, as established legal 
 matters, they came before the critical eye of the schools. 
 And these schools themselves, in their ever restless activity, 
 evolved new laws, according to their logical rules, even when 
 they were not practically wanted nor likely ever to come 
 into practical use — simply as a matter of science. Hence 
 there is a double action perceptible in this legal develop- 
 ment. Either the scriptural verse forms the terminus a quo, 
 or the terminus ad quern. It is either the starting-point for 
 a discussion which ends in the production of some new enact- 
 ment; or some new enactment, or one never before investi- 
 gated, is traced back to the divine source by an outward 
 " hint," however insignificant. 
 
 This process of evolving new precepts from old ones by 
 " signs," — a word curiously enough used also by Blackstone 
 in his " development " of the law — may in some instances 
 have been applied with too much freedom. Yet, while the 
 Talmudical Code practically differs from the Mosaic as much 
 
 c 2
 
 20 THE TALMUD. 
 
 as our Digest will some day differ from the laws of the time 
 of ( 'anute, and as the Justinian Code differs from the Twelve 
 Tables, it cannot be denied that these fundamental laws have 
 in all cases been consulted, carefully and impartially as to 
 their spirit, their letter being often but the vessel or outer 
 symbol. The often uncompromising severity of the Penta- 
 teuch, especially in the province of the penal law, had 
 certainly become much softened down under the milder 
 influences of the culture of later days. Several of its in- 
 junctions, which had become impracticable, were circum- 
 scribed, or almost constitutionally abrogated, by the intro- 
 duction of exceptional formalities. Some of its branches 
 also had developed in a direction other than what at first 
 sight seems to have been anticipated. But the power vested 
 in the "judge of those days " was in general most sparingly 
 and conscientiously applied. 
 
 This w 7 hole process of the development of the " Law " was 
 in the hands of the "Scribes," who, according to the New 
 Testament, "sit in the seat of Moses." We shall speak 
 presently of the " Pharisees " with whom the word is often 
 coupled. Here, meantime, we must once more distinguish 
 between the different meanings of the word " Scribe " at 
 different periods. For there are three stages in the oral 
 compilation of the Talmudical Code, each of which is named 
 after a special class of doctors. 
 
 The task of the first class of these masters — the " Scribes " 
 by way of eminence, whose time ranges from the return from 
 Babylon down to the Greco-Syrian persecutions (220 B.C.) — 
 was above all to preserve the sacred Text, as it had survived 
 after many mishaps. They "enumerated" not merely the 
 precepts, but the words, the letters, the signs of the Scripture,, 
 thereby guarding it from all future interpolations and cor- 
 ruptions. They had further to explain these precepts, in 
 accordance with the collateral tradition of which they were 
 the guardians. They had to instruct the people, to preach 
 in the synagogues, to teach in the schools. They further, on 
 their own authority, erected certain " Fences," i. e. such new 
 injunctions as they deemed necessary merely for the better
 
 THE TALMUD. 21 
 
 keeping of the old precepts. The whole work of these men 
 (" Men of the Great Synagogue ") is well summed up in 
 their adage: "Have a care in legal decisions, send forth 
 many disciples, and make a fence around the law." More 
 pregnant still is the motto of their last representative — the 
 only one whose name, besides those of Ezra and Nehemiah, 
 the supposed founders of this body, has survived — Simon the 
 Just : " On three things stands the world : on law, on worship, 
 and on charity." 
 
 After the " Scribes " — kclt i^o^w — come the " Learners," 
 or " Repeaters," also called Banaim, " Master-builders " — from 
 220 B.C. to 220 a.d. In this period falls the Maccabean 
 Revolution, the birth of Christ, the destruction of the temple 
 by Titus, the revolt of Bar-Cochba under Hadrian, the final 
 destruction of Jerusalem, and the total expatriation of the 
 Jews. During this time Palestine was ruled successively by 
 Persians, Egyptians, Syrians, and Romans. But the legal 
 labours that belong to this period were never seriously inter- 
 rupted. However dread the events, the schools continued 
 their studies. The masters were martyred time after time, 
 the academies were razed to the ground, the practical and 
 the theoretical occupation with the law was proscribed on 
 pain of death — yet in no instance is the chain of the living 
 tradition broken. With their last breath the dying masters 
 appointed and ordained their successors; for one academy 
 that was reduced to a heap of ashes in Palestine, three sprang 
 up in Babylonia, and the Law flowed on, and was perpetuated 
 in the face of a thousand deaths. 
 
 The chief bearers and representatives of these divine legal 
 studies were the President (called Nasi, Prince), and the Vice- 
 President ( Ab-Beth-Din = Father of the House of Judgment) 
 of the highest legal assembly, the Synedrion, aramaised into 
 Sanliedrin. There were three Sanhedrins : one " Great San- 
 hedrin," two " lesser " ones. Whenever the New Testament 
 mentions the " Priests, the Elders, and the Scribes " together, 
 it means the G-reat Sanliedrin. This constituted the highest 
 ecclesiastical and civil tribunal. It consisted of seventy-one 
 members, chosen from the foremost priests, the heads of
 
 22 THE TALMUD. 
 
 tribes and families, and from the " Learned," i. e. the " Scribes "" 
 or Lawyers. It was no easy task to be elected a member of 
 this Supreme Council. The candidate had to be a superior 
 man, both mentally and bodily. He was not to be either too 
 young or too old. Above all, he was to be an adept both in 
 the " Law '* and in Science. 
 
 When people read of " law," " masters " or " doctors of the 
 law," they do not, it seems to us, always fully realise what 
 that word "law" means in Old or rather New Testament 
 language. It should be remembered that, as we have already 
 indicated, it stands for all and every knowledge, since all and 
 every knowledge Avas requisite for the understanding of it- 
 The Mosaic code has injunctions about the sabbatical journey ; 
 the distance had to be measured and calculated, and mathe- 
 matics were called into play. Seeds, plants, and animals had 
 to be studied in connection with the many precepts regarding 
 them, and natural history had to be appealed to. Then 
 there were the purely hygienic paragraphs, which necessitated 
 for their precision a knowledge of all the medical science of 
 the time. The " seasons " and the feast-days were regulated 
 by the phases of the moon ; and astronomy — if only in its 
 elements — had to be studied. And — as the commonwealth 
 successively came in contact, however much against its will 
 at first, with Greece and Rome, — their history, geography, 
 and language came to be added as a matter of instruction to 
 those of Persia and Babylon. It was only a handful of well- 
 meaning but narrow-minded men, like the Essenes, who 
 would not, for their own part, listen to the repeal of certain 
 temporary rt Decrees of Danger." When Hellenic scepticism 
 in its most seductive form had, during the Syrian troubles, 
 begun to seek its victims even in the midst of the " Sacred 
 Vineyard," and threatened to undermine all patriotism and 
 all independence, a curse was pronounced upon Hellenism : 
 much as German patriots, at the beginning of this century, 
 loathed the very sound of the French language ; or as, not so 
 very long ago, all things "foreign" were regarded with a 
 certain suspicion in England. But, the danger over, the 
 ek language and culture were restored to their previous
 
 THE TALMUD. 23 
 
 high position in both the school and the house, as indeed the 
 union of Hebrew and Greek, " the Talith and the Pallium," 
 " Shem and Japheth, who had been blessed together by Noah, 
 and who would always be blessed in union," was strongly 
 insisted upon. We shall return to the polyglott character of 
 those days, the common language of which was an odd mix- 
 ture of Greek, Aramaic, Latin, Syriac, Hebrew ; but the 
 member of the Sanhedrin had to be a good linguist. He was 
 not to be dependent on the possibly tinged version of an 
 interpreter. But not only was science, in its widest sense, 
 required in him, but even an acquaintance with its fantastic 
 shadows, such as astrology, magic, and the rest, in order that 
 he, as both lawgiver and judge, should be able to enter also 
 into the popular feeling about these wide-spread " Arts." 
 Proselytes, eunuchs, freedmen, were rigidly excluded from 
 the Assembly. So were those who could not prove them- 
 selves the legitimate offspring of priests, Levites, or Israelites. 
 And so, further, were gamblers, betting-men, money-lenders, 
 and dealers in illegal produce. To the provision about the 
 age, viz., that the senator should be neither too far advanced 
 in age " lest his judgment might be enfeebled," nor too young 
 " lest it might be immature and hasty ;" and to the proofs 
 required of his vast theoretical and practical knowledge — for 
 lie was only by slow degrees promoted from an obscure 
 judgeship in his native hamlet to the senatorial dignity — 
 there came to be added also that wonderfully fine rule, that 
 he must be a married man and have children of his own. 
 Deep miseries of families would be laid bare before him, and 
 he should bring with him a heart full of sympathy. 
 
 Of the practical administration of justice by the Sanhedrin 
 we have yet to speak when we come to the Corpus Juris 
 itself. It now behoves us to pause a moment at those 
 " schools and academies " of which we have repeatedly made 
 mention, and of which the Sanhedrin formed, as it were, the 
 crown and the highest consummation. 
 
 Eighty years before Christ, schools nourished throughout 
 the length and the breadth of the land ; — education had been 
 made compulsory. While there is not a single term for
 
 24 THE TALMUD. 
 
 "school" to be found before the Captivity, there were by that 
 time about a dozen in common usage. 1 Here are a few of 
 the innumerable popular sayings of the period, betokening 
 the paramount importance which public instruction had 
 assumed in the life of the nation : " Jerusalem was destroyed 
 because the instruction of the young was neglected." " The 
 world is only saved by the breath of the school-children." 
 " Even for the rebuilding of the Temple the schools must not 
 be interrupted." " Study is more meritorious than sacrifice." 
 " A scholar is greater than a prophet." " You should revere 
 the teacher even more than your father. The latter only 
 brought you into this world, the former indicates the way 
 into the next. But blessed is the son who has learnt from 
 his father : he shall revere him both as his father and 
 his master ; and blessed is the father who has instructed his 
 son." 
 
 The "High Colleges" or "Kalians'" 2 only met during 
 some months in the year. Three weeks before the term the 
 Dean prepared the students for the lectures to be delivered 
 by the Hector, and so arduous became the task, as the 
 number of the disciples increased, that in time no less than 
 seven Deans had to be appointed. Yet the mode of teaching 
 was not that of our modern universities. The professors did 
 not deliver lectures, which the disciples, like the Student in 
 " Faust," could " comfortably take home in black and white." 
 Here all was life, movement, debate; question was met by 
 counter-question, answers were given wrapped up in allegories 
 or parables, the inquirer was led to deduce the questionable 
 
 1 Sonic of these terms are Greek, is Kallah. This may he either the 
 
 like &\aos, l\(6s : some, belonging to Hebrew word for " Bride," a well- 
 
 1 1 1 < • pellucid idiom of the people, the known allegorical expression for 
 
 Aramaic, poetically indicated at times science, "assiduously to he courted, 
 
 the special arrangement of the small not lightly to be won, and easily 
 
 and big scholars, e. ;/. "Array," " Vine- estranged ; " or it may be the slightly 
 
 yard" ("where they sat in rows as mutilated Greek axo^rj, or it may 
 
 stands the blooming vine"): while literally be our own word University, 
 
 others are of so uncertain a derivation, from Kol, all, uni versus : an all-em- 
 
 that they may belong to either Ian- bracing institution of all branches of 
 guage. The technical term for the ! learning, 
 highest school, for instance, has long - See preceding note, 
 formed a crux for etymologists. It
 
 THE TALMUD. 25 
 
 point for himself by analogy — the nearest approach to the 
 Socratic method. The New Testament furnishes many spe- 
 cimens of this contemporary method of instruction. 
 
 The highest rank in the estimation of the people was not 
 reserved for the " Priests," about whose real position some 
 extraordinary notions seem still afloat — nor for the " Nobles" 
 — but for these Masters of the Law, the " Wise," the " Dis- 
 ciples of the Wise." There is something almost German in 
 the profound reverence uniformly shown to these repre- 
 sentatives of science and learning, however poor and insig- 
 nificant in person and rank. Many of the most eminent 
 " Doctors " were but humble tradesmen. They were tent- 
 makers, sandalmakers, weavers, carpenters, tanners, bakers, 
 cooks. A newly-elected President was found by his pre- 
 decessor, who had been ignominiously dejjosed for his over- 
 bearing manner, all grimy in the midst of his charcoal 
 mounds. Of all things the most hated were idleness and 
 asceticism ; piety and learning themselves only received their 
 proper estimation when joined to healthy bodily work. " It 
 is well to add a trade to your studies ; you will then be free 
 from sin." — " The tradesman at his work need not rise before 
 the greatest Doctor." — " Greater is he who derives his 
 livelihood from work than he who fears God " — are some of 
 the most common dicta of the period. 
 
 The exalted place thus given to Work, as on the one hand 
 it prevented an abject worship of Learning, so on the other 
 it kept all ascetic eccentricities from the body of the people. 
 And there was always some danger of thern at hand. When 
 the Temple lay in ashes, men would no longer eat meat or 
 drink wine. A Sage remonstrated with them, but they 
 replied, weeping : " Once the flesh of sacrifices was burnt 
 upon the Altar of God. The altar is thrown down. Once 
 libations of wine were poured out. They are no more." 
 "But you eat bread; there were bread-offerings." "You 
 are right, Master, we shall eat fruit only." " But the first 
 fruits were offered up." " We shall refrain from them." 
 " But you drink water, and there were libations of water." 
 And they knew not what to reply. Then he comforted them
 
 26 THE TALMUD. 
 
 by the assurance that He who had destroyed Jerusalem had 
 promised to rebuild it, and that proper mourning was right 
 and meet, but that it must not be of a nature to weaken 
 the body for work. 
 
 Another most striking story is that of the Sage who, 
 walking in a market-place crowded with people, suddenly 
 encountered the prophet Elijah, and asked him w r ho, out of 
 that vast multitude, would be saved. Whereupon the Pro- 
 phet first pointed out a weird-looking creature, a turnkey, 
 '' because he was merciful to his prisoners ; " and next two 
 common-looking tradesmen, who came walking through the 
 crowd, pleasantly chatting. The Sage instantly rushed 
 towards them, and asked them what were their saving works. 
 But they, much puzzled, replied : " We are but poor work- 
 men who live by our trade. All that can be said for us is 
 that we are always of good cheer, and are good-natured. 
 When we meet anybody who seems sad we join him, and we 
 talk to him, and cheer him, so long that he must forget his 
 grief. And if we know of two people who have quarrelled, 
 we talk to them and persuade them, until we have made 
 them friends again. This is our whole life." .... 
 
 Before leaving this period of Mishnic development, we 
 have yet to speak of one or two things. This period is the 
 one in which Christianity arose ; and it may be as well to 
 touch here upon the relation between Christianity and the 
 Talmud — a subject much discussed of late. Were not the 
 whole of our general views on the difference between Judaism 
 and Christianity greatly confused, people would certainly 
 not be so very much surprised at the striking parallels of 
 dogma and parable, of allegory and proverb, exhibited by 
 the Gospel and the Talinudical writings. The New Testament, 
 written, as Lightfoot has it, " among Jews, by Jews, for Jews," 
 cannot but speak the language of the time, both as to form 
 and, broadly speaking, as to contents. There are many more 
 vital points of contact between the New Testament and the 
 Talmud than divines yet seem fully to realise ; for such 
 terms as "Redemption," "Baptism," "Grace," "Faith," 
 -Salvation," "Regeneration," "Son of Man," "Son of God,"
 
 THE TALMUD. 2/ 
 
 "Kingdom of Heaven," were not, as we are apt to think, 
 invented by Christianity, but were household words of Tal- 
 mudical Judaism. No less loud and bitter in the Talmud are 
 the protests against " lip-serving," against " making the law 
 a burden to the people," against " laws that hang on hairs," 
 against "Priests and Pharisees." The fundamental mysteries 
 of the new Faith are matters totally apart ; but the Ethics 
 in both are, in their broad outlines, identical. That grand 
 dictum, "Do unto others as thou wouldst be done by," 
 against which Kant declared himself energetically from a 
 philosophical point of view, is quoted by Hillel, the President, 
 at whose death Jesus was ten years of age, not as anything 
 new, but as an old and well-known dictum " that comprised 
 the whole Law." The most monstrous mistake has ever been 
 our mixing up, in the first instance, single individuals, or 
 classes, with a whole people, and next our confounding the 
 Judaism of the time of Christ with that of the time of the 
 Wilderness, of the Judges, or even of Abraham, Isaac, and 
 Jacob. The Judaism of the time of Christ (to which that 
 of our days, owing principally to the Talmud, stands very 
 near), and that of the Pentateuch, are as like each other as 
 our England is like that of William Kuais, or the Greece of 
 Plato that of the Argonauts. It is the glory of Christianity 
 to have carried those golden germs, hidden in the schools 
 and among the " silent community " of the learned, into the 
 market of Humanity. It has communicated that " Kingdom 
 of Heaven," of which the Talmud is full from the first page 
 to the last, to the herd, even to the lepers. The fruits that 
 have sprung from this through the wide world we need not 
 here consider. But the misconception, as if to a God of 
 Vengeance had suddenly succeeded a God of Love, cannot be 
 too often protested against. " Thou shalt love thy neighbour 
 as thyself" is a precept of the Old Testament, as Christ 
 himself taught his disciples. The " Law," as we have seen 
 and shall further see, was developed to a marvellously and 
 perhaps oppressively minute pitch ; but only as a regulator 
 of outward actions. The " faith of the heart " — the dogma 
 prominently dwelt upon by Paul — was a thing that stood
 
 28 THE TALMUD. 
 
 much higher with the Pharisees than this outward law. It 
 was a thing, they said, not to he commanded by any ordi- 
 nance; yet was greater than all. "Everything," is one of 
 their adages, " is in the hands of Heaven, save the fear of 
 Heaven." 
 
 " Six hundred and thirteen injunctions/' says the Talmud, " was Moses 
 instructed to give to the people. David reduced them all to eleven, in the 
 fifteenth Psalm : Lord, who shall ahide in Thy tahernaclc, who shall dwell 
 on Thy holy hill ? He that walketh uprightly," &c. 
 
 " The Prophet Isaiah reduced them to six (xxxiii. 15) : — He that 
 walketh righteously," &c. 
 
 " The Prophet Micali reduced them to three (vi. 8) : What doth the 
 Lord require of thee hut to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk 
 humhly with thy God ? 
 
 " Isaiah once more reduced them to two (Ivi. 1) : — Keep ye judgment 
 and do justice. 
 
 " Amos (v. 4) reduced them all to one : — Seek ye me and ye shall 
 live. 
 
 "Put lest it might he supposed from this that God could he found in 
 the fulfilment of his whole law only, Habakkuk said (ii. 4) : — ' The just 
 shall live hy his Faith.' " 
 
 Regarding these " Pharisees " or " Separatists " themselves, 
 no greater or more antiquated mistake exists than that of 
 their being a mere " sect " hated by Christ and the Apostles. 
 They were not a sect, — any more than Roman Catholics 
 form a "sect" in Rome, or Protestants a "sect" in England, 
 — and they were not hated so indiscriminately by Christ and 
 the Apostles as would at first sight appear from some sweep- 
 ing passages in the New Testament. For the " Pharisees," 
 as such, were at that time — Josephus notwithstanding — 
 simply the people, in contradistinction to the "leaven of 
 Herod." Those " upper classes " of free-thinking Sadducees 
 who, in opposition to the Pharisees, insisted on the paramount 
 importance of sacrifices and tithes, of which they were the 
 receivers, but denied the Immortality of the Soul, are barely 
 mentioned in the New Testament. The wholesale denun- 
 ciations of "Scribes and Pharisees" have been greatly mis- 
 understood. There can be absolutely no question on this 
 point, that there were among the genuine Pharisees the most 
 patriotic, the most noble minded, the most advanced leaders
 
 THE TALMUD. 29 
 
 of the Party of Progress. The development of the Law itself 
 was nothing in their hands but a means to keep the Spirit as 
 opposed to the Word — the outward frame — in full life and 
 flame, and to vindicate for each time its own right to interpret 
 the temporal ordinances according to its own necessities and 
 requirements. But that there were very many black sheep 
 in their flock — many who traded on the high reputation of 
 the whole body — is matter of reiterated denunciation in the 
 whole contemporary literature. The Talmud inveighs even 
 more bitterly and caustically than the New Testament against 
 what it calls the "Plague of Pharisaism," "the dyed, ones," 
 " who do evil deeds like Zimri, and require a goodly reward 
 like Phinehas," " they who preach beautifully, but do not act 
 beautifully." Parodying their exaggerated logical arrange- 
 ments, their scrupulous divisions and subdivisions, the Talmud 
 distinguishes seven classes of Pharisees, one of whom only is 
 worthy of that name. These are — 1, those who do the will 
 of God from earthly motives ; 2, they who make small steps, 
 or say, just wait a while for me ; I have just one more good 
 work to perform ; 3, they who knock their heads against walls 
 in avoiding the sight of a woman; 4, saints in office; 5, they 
 who implore you to mention some more duties which they 
 might perform ; 6, they who are pious because they fear God. 
 The real and only Pharisee is he " who does the will of his 
 father which is in Heaven because he loves Him." Among 
 those chiefly " Pharisaic " masters of the Mishnic period, 
 whose names and fragments of whose lives have come down 
 to us, are some of' the most illustrious men, men at whose 
 feet the first Christians sat, whose sayings — household words 
 in the mouths of the people — prove them to have been 
 endowed with no common wisdom, piety, kindness, and high 
 and noble courage : a courage and a piety they had often 
 enough occasion to seal with their lives. 
 
 From this hasty outline of the mental atmosphere of the 
 time when the Mishnah was gradually built up, we now turn 
 to this Code itself. The bulk of ordinances, injunctions, pro- 
 hibitions, precepts, — the old and new, traditional, derived, or 
 enacted on the spur of the moment, — had, after about eight
 
 30 THE TALMUD. 
 
 hundred years, risen to gigantic proportions, proportions no 
 longer to be mastered in their scattered, and be it remem- 
 bered, chiefly unwritten, form. Thrice, at different periods, 
 the work of reducing them to system and order was under- 
 taken by three eminent masters ; the third alone succeeded. 
 First by Hillel I., under whose presidency Christ was born. 
 This Hillel, also called the second Ezra, was born in Babylon. 
 Thirst for knowledge drove him to Jerusalem. He was so 
 poor, the legend tells us, that once, when he had not money 
 enough to fee the porter of the academy, he climbed up the 
 window-sill one bitter winter's night. As he lay there listening, 
 the cold gradually made him insensible, and the snow 
 covered him up. The darkness of the room first called the 
 attention of those inside to the motionless form without. 
 He w r as restored to life. Be it observed, by the way, that 
 this was on a Sabbath, as, according to the Talmud, danger 
 always supersedes the Sabbath. Even for the sake of the 
 tiniest babe it must be broken without the slightest hesi- 
 tation, "for the babe will," it is added, "keep many a 
 Sabbath yet for that one that was broken for it." 
 
 And here we cannot refrain from entering an emphatic 
 protest against the vulgar notion of the " Jewish Sabbath " 
 being a thing of grim austerity. It was precisely the con- 
 trary, a " day of joy and delight," a " feast day," honoured 
 by fine garments, by the best cheer, by wine, lights, spice, 
 and other joys of pre-eminently bodily import : and the 
 highest expression of the feeling of self-reliance and inde- 
 pendence is contained in the adage, " Kather live on your 
 Sabbath as you would on a week day, than be dependent on 
 others." But this only by the way. 
 
 About 30 B.C. Hillel became President. Of his meekness, 
 his piety, his benevolence, the Talmudical records are full. 
 A few of his sayings will characterise him better than any 
 sketch of ours could do. "Be a disciple of Aaron, a friend 
 of peace, a promoter of peace, a friend of all men, and draw 
 them near unto the law." " Do not believe in thyself till 
 the day of thy death." "Do not judge thy neighbour until 
 thou hast stood in his place." " Whosoever does not increase
 
 THE TALMUD. 31 
 
 in knowledge decreases." " Whosoever tries to make gain 
 by the crown of learning perishes.'' Immediately after the 
 lecture he used to hurry home. Once asked by his disciples 
 what caused him to hasten away, he replied he had to look 
 after his guest. When they pressed him for the name of 
 his guest, he said that he meant his soul, which was here 
 to-day and there to-morrow. One day a heathen went to 
 Shammai, the head of the rival academy, and asked him 
 mockingly to convert him to the law while he stood on one 
 leg. The irate master turned him from his door. He then 
 went to Hillel, who received him kindly and gave him that 
 reply — since so widely propagated — " Do not unto another 
 what thou wouldest not have another do unto thee. This is 
 the whole Law, the rest is mere commentary." Very charac- 
 teristic is also his answer to one of those " wits " who used to 
 plague him with their silly questions. " How many laws are 
 there ?" he asked Hillel. " Two," Hillel replied, " one written 
 and one oral." Whereupon the other, " I believe in the first, 
 but I do not see why I should believe in the second." " Sit 
 down," Hillel said. And he wrote down the Hebrew alphabet. 
 " What letter is this ?" he then asked, pointing to the first. 
 « This is an Aleph." " Good, the next ?" " Beth." " Good 
 again. But how do you know that this is an Aleph and 
 this a Beth ? " " Thus," the other replied, " we have learnt 
 from our ancestors." "Well," Hillel said, "as you have 
 accepted this in good faith, accept also the other." To his 
 mind the necessity of arranging and simplifying that mon- 
 strous bulk of oral traditions seems to have presented itself 
 first with all its force. There were no less than some six 
 hundred vaguely floating sections of it in existence by that 
 time. He tried to reduce them to six. But he died, and 
 the work commenced by him was left untouched for another 
 century. Akiba, the poor shepherd who fell in love with 
 the daughter of the richest and proudest man in all Jeru- 
 salem, and, through his love, from a clown became one of 
 the most eminent doctors of his generation, nay " a second 
 Moses," came next. But he too was unsuccessful. His legal 
 labours were cut short by the Koman executioner. Yet the
 
 32 THE TALMUD. 
 
 day of his martyrdom is said to have been the day of 
 the birth of him who, at last, did carry out the work, — 
 Jehuda, the Saint, also called " Rabbi " by way of eminence. 
 About 200 a.d. the redaction of the whole unwritten law 
 into a code, though still unwritten, was completed after the 
 immense efforts, not of one school, but of all, not through 
 one, but many methods of collection, comparison, and con- 
 densation. 
 
 When the Code was drawn up, it was already obsolete 
 in many of its parts. More than a generation before the 
 Destruction of the Temple, Rome had taken the penal juris- 
 diction from the Sanhedrin. The innumerable injunctions 
 regarding the temple-service, the sacrifices, and the rest, had 
 but an ideal value. The agrarian laws for the most part 
 applied only to Palestine, and but an insignificant fraction 
 of the people had remained faithful to the desecrated land. 
 Nevertheless the whole Code was eagerly received as their 
 text-book by the many academies both in Palestine and in 
 Babylonia, not merely as a record of past enactments, but 
 as laws that at some time or other, with the restoration of 
 the commonwealth, would come into full practice as of yore. 
 
 The Mishnah is divided into six sections. These are sub- 
 divided again into 11, 12, 7, 9 (or 10), 11, and 12 chapters 
 respectively, which are further broken up into 524 para- 
 graphs. We shall briefly describe their contents : — 
 
 " Section I., Seeds : of Agrarian Laws, commencing with a chapter 
 on Prayers. In this section the various tithes and donations due to the 
 Priests, the Levites, and the poor, from the products of the lands, and 
 farther the Sabbatical year, and the prohibited mixtures in plants, animals, 
 and garments, are treated of*. 
 
 "Section IT., Feasts : of Sabbaths, Feast and Fast days, the work 
 prohibited, the ceremonies ordained, the sacrifices to be offered, on them. 
 Special chapters are devoted to the Feast of the Exodus from Egypt, to the 
 New Year's Day, to the Lay of Atonement (one of the most impressive 
 portions of the whole book), to the Feast of Tabernacles, and to that of 
 Haroan. 
 
 " Section III., Women : of betrothal, marriage, divorce, &c. : also of 
 vows. 
 
 "Section IV., Damages : including a great part of the civil and criminal 
 law. It treats of the law of trover, of buying and selling, and the ordinary
 
 THE TALMUD. 33 
 
 monetary transactions. Further, of the greatest crime known to the law, 
 viz., idolatry. Next of witnesses, of oaths, of legal punishments, and of 
 the Sanhedrin itself. This section concludes with the so-called ' Sentences 
 of the Fathers,' containing some of the sublimest ethical dicta known in 
 the history of religious philosophy. 
 
 " Section V., Sacred Tilings : of sacrifices, the first-horn, &c. ; also of 
 the measurements of the Temple (Middoth). 
 
 " Section VI., Purifications : of the various levitical and other hygienic 
 laws, of impure things and persons, their purification, &c." 
 
 There is, it cannot be denied, more symmetry and method 
 in the Mishnah than in the Pandects ; although we have not 
 found that minute logical sequence in its arrangement which 
 Maimonides and others have discovered. In fact, we do not 
 believe that we have it in its original shape. But, as far as 
 the single treatises are concerned, the Mishnah is for the 
 most part free from the blemishes of the Eoman Code. There 
 are, unquestionably, fewer contradictory laws, fewer repe- 
 titious, fewer interpolations, than in the Digests, which, 
 notwithstanding Tribonian's efforts, abound with so-called 
 " Geminationes," "Leges fugitivee," " errativae," and so forth; 
 and, as regards a certain outspokenness in bodily things, it 
 has at last been acknowledged by all competent authorities 
 that its language is infinitely purer than that, for instance, 
 of the medieval casuists. 
 
 The regulations contained in these six treatises are of 
 very different kinds. They are apparently important and 
 unimportant, intended to be permanent or temporary. They 
 are either clear expansions of Scriptural precepts, or inde- 
 pendent traditions, linked to Scripture only hermeneutically. 
 They are " decisions," "fences," " injunctions," " ordinances," 
 or simply "Mosaic Halachah from Sinai" — much as the 
 Roman laws consist of " Senatusconsulta," " Plebiscita," 
 " Edicta," " Responsa Prudentium," and the rest. Save in 
 points of dispute, the Mishnah does not say when and how 
 a special law was made. Only exceptionally do we read the 
 introductory formula " N. N. has borne witness," " I have 
 heard from N. N.," &c. ; for nothing was admitted into the 
 Code but that which was well authenticated first. There 
 is no difference made between great laws and little laws — 
 
 D
 
 34 TIIE TALMUD. 
 
 between ancient and new Halachah. Every precept tradi- 
 tionally received or passed by the majority becomes, in a 
 manner, a religious, divinely sanctioned one, although it was 
 always open to the subsequent authorities to reconsider and 
 to abrogate ; as, indeed, one of the chief reasons against the 
 writing down of the Code, even after its redaction, was just 
 this, that it should never become fixed and immutable. That 
 the Mishnah was appealed to for all practical purposes, in 
 preference to the " Mosaic " law, seems clear and natural. 
 Do we generally appeal in our law-courts to the Magna 
 Charta ? 
 
 This uniform reverence for all the manifold contents of 
 the Mishnah is best expressed in the redactor's own words — 
 the motto to the whole collection — " Be equally consci- 
 entious in small as in great precejDts, for ye know not their 
 individual rewards. Compute the earthly loss sustained by 
 the fulfilment of a law by the heavenly reward derived 
 through it; and the gain derived from a transgression by 
 the punishment that is to follow it. Also contemplate three 
 things, and ye shall not fall into sin : Know what is above 
 ye — an eye that seeth, an ear that hearetb, and all your 
 works are written in a book." 
 
 The tone and tenor of the Mishnah is, except in the one 
 special division devoted to Ethics, emphatically practical. 
 It does not concern itself with Metaphysics, but aims at 
 being merely a civil code. Yet it never misses an oppor- 
 tunity of inculcating those higher ethical principles which 
 lie beyond the strict letter of the law. It looks more to 
 the " intention " in the fulfilment of a precept than to the 
 fulfilment itself. He who claims certain advantages by the 
 letter of the law, though the spirit of humanity should urge 
 him not to insist upon them, is not "beloved by God and 
 man." On the other hand, he who makes good by his own 
 free will demands which the law could not have enforced ; 
 he, in fact, who does not stop short at the " Gate of Justice," 
 but proceeds within the " line of mercy," in him the " spirit 
 of the wise " has pleasure. Certain duties bring fruits (in- 
 terest) in this world ; but the real reward, the " capital," is 

 
 THE TALMUD. 35 
 
 paid back in the world to come : such as reverence for father 
 and mother, charity, early application to study, hospitality, 
 doing the last honour to the dead, promoting peace between 
 man and his neighbour. The Mishnah knows nothing of 
 "Hell." For all and any transgressions there were only the 
 fixed legal punishments, or a mysterious sudden " visitation 
 of God" — the scriptural "rooting out." Death atones for 
 all sins. Minor transgressions are redeemed by repentance, 
 charity, sacrifice, and the day of atonement. Sins committed 
 against man are only forgiven when the injured man has 
 had full amends made and declares himself reconciled. The 
 highest virtue lies in the study of the law. It is not only 
 the badge of high culture (as was of old the case in England), 
 but there is a special merit bound up in it that will assist 
 man both in this and in the world to come. Even a bastard 
 who is learned in it is more honoured than a high-priest 
 who is not. 
 
 To discuss these laws, their spirit, and their details, in 
 this place, we cannot undertake. But this much we may 
 say, that it has always been the unanimous opinion of both 
 friends and foes that their general character is humane in 
 the extreme : in spite of certain harsh and exceptional laws, 
 issued in times of danger and misery, of revolution and 
 reaction ; laws, moreover, which for the most part never were 
 and never could be carried into practice. There is an almost 
 modern liberality of view regarding the " fulfilment of the 
 Law " itself, expressed by such frequent adages as " The 
 Scripture says: 'he shall live by them' — that means, he 
 shall not die through them. They shall not be made pitfalls 
 or burdens to him, that shall make him hate life.' 'He 
 who carries out these precepts to the full is declared to be 
 nothing less than a Saint.' " " The law has been given to 
 men, and not to angels." 
 
 Respecting the practical administration of justice, a sharp 
 distinction is drawn by the Mishnah between the civil and 
 criminal law. In both the most careful investigation and 
 scrutiny is required ; but while in the former three judges 
 are competent, a tribunal of no 'less than twenty-three is 
 
 D 2
 
 36 THE TALMUD. 
 
 required for the latter. The first duty of the civil judges 
 is always — however clear the case — to urge an agreement. 
 "When," says the Talmud, " do justice and goodwill meet? 
 When the contending parties are made to agree peace- 
 ably." There were both special local magistrates and casual 
 "justices of peace," chosen ad hoc by the parties. Pay- 
 ment received for a decision annuls the decision. Loss of 
 time only was allowed to be made good in case of tradesmen- 
 judges. The plaintiff, if proved to have asked more than 
 his due, with a view of thus obtaining his due more readily, 
 was nonsuited. Three partners in an action must not divide 
 themselves into one plaintiff and two witnesses. The Judge 
 must see that both parties are pretty equally dressed, i.e. 
 not one in fine garments, the others in rags ; and he is 
 further particularly cautioned not to be biassed in favour of 
 the poor against the rich. The Judge must not hear anything- 
 of the case, save in the presence of both parties. Many and 
 striking are also the admonitions regarding the Judge. " He 
 who unjustly hands over one man's goods to another, he shall 
 pay God for it with his own soul." " In the hour when the 
 Judge sits in judgment over his fellow-men, he shall feel, 
 as it were, a sword pointed at his own heart." " Woe unto 
 the Judge who, convinced in his mind of the unrighteousness 
 of a cause, tries to throw the blame on the witnesses. From 
 him God will ask an account," " When the parties stand 
 before you, look upon both as guilty ; but when they are 
 dismissed, let them both be innocent in thine eyes, for the 
 decree has gone forth." 
 
 It would not be easy to find a more humane, almost 
 refined, penal legislation, from the days of the old world 
 to our own. While in civil cases — whenever larger tribunals 
 (juries) had to be called in — a majority of one is sufficient 
 for either acquittal or condemnation ; in criminal cases a 
 majority of one acquits, but a majority of two is requisite 
 for condemnation. All men are accepted in the former as 
 witnesses — always except gamblers (Kvfieia — dice-players), 
 betting-men ("pigeon-flyers"), usurers, dealers in illegal 
 (seventh year's) produce, and slaves, who were disqualified 

 
 THE TALMUD. 37 
 
 from "judging and bearing witness" — either for the plaintiff 
 or the defendant ; but it is only for the defence that every- 
 body, indiscriminately, is heard, in criminal* cases. The 
 cross-examination of the witnesses was exceedingly strict. 
 The formula (containing at once a whole breviary for the 
 Judge himself), with which the witnesses were admonished 
 in criminal cases was of so awful and striking a nature, that 
 " swearing a man's life away " became an almost unheard-of 
 occurrence : — 
 
 "How is one," says the Mishnah, "to awe the witnesses who are called 
 to testify in matters of life and death ? When they are brought into Court, 
 they are charged thus : Perchance you would speak from conjecture or 
 rumour, as a witness from another witness — having heard it from ' some 
 trustworthy man ' — or perchance you are not aware that we shall proceed 
 to search and to try you with close questions and searching scrutiny. 
 Know ye that not like trials about money are trials over life and death. 
 In trials of money a man may redeem his guilt by money, and he may be 
 forgiven. In trials of life, the blood not only of him who has been falsely 
 ■condemned will hang over the false witness, but also that of the seed of his 
 seed, even unto the end of the world ; for thus we find that when Cain 
 killed his brother, it is said, ' The voice of thy brother's blood is crying to 
 me from the ground.' The word blood stands there in the plural number, 
 to indicate to you that the blood of him, together with that of his seed, has 
 been shed. Adam was created alone, to show you that he who destroys 
 one single life will be called to account for it, as if he had destroyed a 
 
 whole world But, on the other hand, ye might say to yourselves, 
 
 What have we to do with all this misery here? Kemember, then, that 
 Holy Writ has said (Lev. v. 1), ' If a witness hath seen or known, if he 
 do not utter, he shall bear his iniquity.' But perchance ye might say, 
 Why shall we be guilty of this man's blood? Bemember, then, what 
 is said in Proverbs (xi. 10), ,' In the destruction of the wicked there 
 is joy.'" 
 
 The " Lex Talionis " is unknown to the Talmud. Paying 
 ■" measure for measure," it says, " is in God's hand only." 
 Bodily injuries inflicted are to be redeemed by money ; and 
 here again the Pharisees had carried the day against the 
 Sadducees, who insisted upon the literal interpretation of 
 the " eye for eye." The extreme punishments, " flagellation " 
 and " death," as ordained in the Mosaic Code, were inflicted 
 in a humane manner unknown, as we have said, not only to 
 the contemporary courts of antiquity, but even to those of
 
 38 THE TALMUD. 
 
 Europe up to within the last generation. Thirty-nine was 
 
 the utmost number of strokes to be inflicted: but — the 
 " loving one's neighbour like oneself " being constantly urged 
 by the Penal Code itself, even with regard to criminals — 
 if the life of the culprit was in the least degree endangered 
 this number was at once reduced. However numerous the 
 delinquent's transgressions, but one punishment could be 
 decreed for them all. Not even a fine and flagellation could 
 be pronounced on the same occasion. 
 
 The care taken of human life was extreme indeed. The 
 judges of capital offences had to fast all day, nor was the 
 sentence executed on the day of the verdict, but it was once 
 more subjected to scrutiny by the Sanhedrin the next day. 
 Even to the last some favourable circumstance that might 
 turn the scale in the prisoner's favour was looked for. The 
 place of execution was at some distance from the Court, in 
 order that time might be given to a witness or the accused 
 himself for naming any fresh fact in his favour. A man was 
 stationed at the entrance to the Court, with a flag in his 
 hand, and at some distance another man, on horseback, was 
 stationed, in order to stop the execution instantly if any 
 favourable circumstance should still come to light. The 
 culprit himself was allowed to stop four or five times, and to 
 be brought back before the judges, if he had still something 
 to urge in his defence. Before him marched a herald, crying, 
 " The man N". N., son of N. N., is being led to execution for 
 having committed such and such a crime; such and such 
 are the witnesses against him; whosoever knows aught to 
 his favour, let him come and proclaim it." Ten yards from 
 the place of execution they said to him, " Confess thy sins ; 
 every one who confesses has part in the w r orld to come ; for 
 thus it is written of Achan, to whom Joshua said, My son, 
 give now glory to the God of Israel." If he "could not" 
 offer any formal confession, he need only say, "May my 
 death be a redemption for all my sins." To the last the 
 culprit was supported by marks of profound and awful sym- 
 pathy. The ladies of Jerusalem formed a society which 
 provided a beverage of mixed myrrh and vinegar, that, like 

 
 THE TALMUD. 39 
 
 an opiate, benumbed the man when he was being carried to 
 execution. 
 
 There were four kinds of capital punishment, — stoning, 
 burning, slaying with the sword, and strangling. Crucifixion 
 is utterly unknown to the Jewish law. " The house of ston- 
 ing " was two stories high, " stoning " in the Mishnah being 
 merely a term for breaking the culprit's neck. It was the 
 part of the chief witness to precipitate the criminal with his 
 own hand. If he fell on his breast he was turned on his 
 back ; if the fall had not killed him on the spot, the second 
 witness had to cast a stone on his heart ; if he still survived, 
 then and then only^ the whole people hastened his death 
 by casting stones upon him. The modes of strangling and 
 burning were almost identical : in both cases the culprit was 
 immersed to his waist in soft mud, and two men by tight- 
 ening a cord wrapped in a soft cloth round his neck, caused 
 instantaneous suffocation. In the " burning " a lighted wick 
 was thrown down his throat when he opened his mouth at 
 his last breath. The corpse was buried in a special place 
 appropriated to criminals. After a time, however, the bones 
 were gathered together and transferred to the burial place 
 of the culprit's kin. The relations then visited the judges 
 and the witnesses, " as much as to say, we bear no malice 
 against you, for a righteous judgment have ye judged." The 
 ordinary ceremonies of outer mourning were not observed in 
 such cases, but lamentation was not prohibited during the 
 first period of grief — " for sorrow is from the heart." There 
 was no confiscation of the culprit's goods. 
 
 Practically, capital punishment was abrogated even before 
 the Romans had taken it out of the hands of the Sanhedrim 
 Here again the humanising influences of the " Traditions " 
 had been at work, commuting the severe Mosaic Code. The 
 examination of witnesses had been made so rigorous that 
 a sentence of capital punishment became almost impossible. 
 When the guilt had, notwithstanding all these difficulties, 
 been absolutely brought home, some formal flaw was sure 
 to be found, and the sentence was commuted to imprison- 
 ment for life. The doctors of a later period, notably Akiba,
 
 40 THE TALMUD. 
 
 who, in the midst of his revolutionary dreams of a new 
 Independence, kept his eye steadily on a reform of the whole 
 jurisdiction, did not hesitate to pronounce openly for the 
 abolition of capital punishment. A Court which had pro- 
 nounced one sentence of death in seven, or even seventy 
 years, received the name of " Court of Murderers." 
 
 So far the Mishnah, that brief abstract of about eight 
 hundred years' legal production. Jehudah, the " Redactor," 
 had excluded all but the best authenticated traditions, as 
 well as all discussion and exegesis, unless where particularly 
 necessary. The vast mass of these materials was now also 
 collected, as a sort of apocryphal oral code. We have, 
 dating from a few generations after the redaction of the 
 official Mishnah, a so-called external Mishnah (Boraita) ; 
 further the discussions and additions belonging by rights 
 to the Mishnah, called Tosefta (Supplement); and, finally, 
 the exegesis and methodology of the Halacha (Sifri, Sifra, 
 Mechilta), much of which was afterwards embodied in the 
 Talmud. 
 
 The Mishnah, being formed into a code, became in its turn 
 what the Scripture had been, a basis of development and 
 discussion. It had to be linked to the Bible, it became im- 
 pregnated with and obscured by speculations, new traditions 
 sprang up, new methods were invented, casuistry assumed 
 its sway — as it did in the legal schools that flourished at 
 that period at Rome, at Alexandria, at Berytus, — and the 
 Gemara ensued. A double Gemara : one, the expression of 
 the schools in Palestine, called that of Jerusalem, redacted 
 at Tiberias (not at Jerusalem) about 390 a.d., and written 
 in what may be called "East Aramaean;" the other, redacted 
 at Syra in Babylonia, edited by R. Ashe (365-427 A.D.). 
 The final close of this codex, however, the collecting and 
 sifting of which took just sixty years, is due to the school 
 of the " Saboraim " at the end of the fifth century a.d. The 
 Babylonian Gemara is the expression of the academies of Syra, 
 Nehardea, Pum-Veditha, Mahusa, and other places, during 
 six or seven generations of continuous development. This 
 "Babylonian" Talmud is couched in " Western Aramaean."
 
 THE TALMUD. 41 
 
 Neither of the two codes was written down at first, and 
 neither has survived in its completeness. Whether there 
 ever was a double Gemara to all the six or even the first five 
 divisions of the Mishnah (the sixth having early fallen into 
 disuse), is at least very doubtful. Much however that 
 existed has been lost. The Babylonian Talmud is about 
 four times as large as that of Jerusalem. Its thirty-six 
 treatises now cover, in our editions, printed with the most 
 prominent commentaries (Rashi and Tosafoth), exactly 2947 
 folio leaves in twelve folio volumes, the pagination of which 
 is kept uniform in almost all editions. If, however, the 
 extraneous portions are subtracted, it is only about ten or 
 eleven times as large as the Mishnah, which was redacted 
 just as many generations before the Talmud. 
 
 How the Talmud itself became by degrees what the 
 Mishnah had been to the Gemara, and what the Scripture 
 had been to the early Scribes, viz. a Text ; how the " Amo- 
 raim" (speakers), "Saboraim," and "Gaonim," those Epigoni 
 of the "Scribes," made it the centre of their activity for 
 centuries; what endless commentaries, dissertations, exposi- 
 tions, responses, novella?, abstracts, &c, grew out of it, we 
 cannot here tell. Only this much we will add, that the 
 Talmud, as such, was never formally accepted by the nation, 
 by either General or Special Council. Its legal decisions, 
 as derived from the highest authorities, certainly formed the 
 basis of the religious law, the norm of all future decisions : 
 as undoubtedly the Talmud is the most trustworthy canon of 
 Jewish tradition. But its popularity is much more due to an 
 extraneous cause. During the persecutions against the Jews 
 in the Persian empire, under Jesdegerd II., Firuz, and 
 Kobad, the schools were closed for about eighty years. The 
 living development of the law being stopped, the book 
 obtained a supreme authority, such as had probably never 
 been dreamt of by its authors. Need we add that what 
 authority was silently vested in it belonged exclusively to its 
 legal portions? The other, the " haggadistic " or legendary 
 portion, was "poetry," a thing beloved by women and chil- 
 dren and by those still and pensive minds which delight in
 
 •12 THE TALMUD. 
 
 flowers and in the song of wild birds. The " Authorities " 
 themselves often enough set their faces against it, repudiated 
 it and explained it away. But the people clung to it, and 
 in course of time gave to it and it alone the encyclopaedic 
 name of " Midrash." 
 
 We have now to say a few words respecting the language 
 in which these documents are couched, as furnishing an addi- 
 tional key to the mode of life and thoughts of the period. 
 
 The language of the Mishnah is as pure a Hebrew as can 
 be expected in those days. The people themselves spoke, as 
 we mentioned above, a corrupt Chaldee or Aramaic, mixed 
 with Greek and Latin. Many prayers of the period, the 
 Targums, the Gemaras, are conceived in that idiom. Even 
 the Mishnah itself could not exclude these all-pervading 
 foreign elements. Many legal terms, many names of pro- 
 ducts, of heathen feasts, of household furniture, of meat and 
 drink, of fruits and garments, are borrowed from the classical 
 languages. Here is a curious addition to the curious history 
 of words ! The bread which the Semites had cast upon the 
 waters, in the archaic Phoenician times, came back to them 
 after many days. If they had given to the early Greeks the 
 names for weights and measures, 1 for spice and aromas, 2 
 every one of which is Hebrew: if they had imported the 
 " sapphire, jasper, emerald," the fine materials for garments, 3 
 and the garments themselves — as indeed the well-known 
 Xircov is but the Hebrew name for Joseph's coat in the Bible 
 — if the musical instruments, 4 the plants, vessels, writing 
 materials, and last, not least, the " alphabet " itself, came 
 from the Semites : the Greek and Latin idioms repaid them 
 in the Talmudical period with full interest, to the great 
 distress of the later scholiasts and lexicographers. The 
 Aramaic itself was, as we said, the language of the common 
 people. It was, in itself, a most pellucid and picturesque 
 idiom, lending itself admirably not only to the epigrammatic 
 terseness of the Gemara, but also to those profoundly poetical 
 
 1 fiva, KaSos, SpaxpTi. 
 
 2 /xvfifia, KivvdfjLwfiLoy, xacria, vdpDos, 
 fiaAcra.fJi.ov, o.K6tj, Kp6Kos, &C. 
 
 3 fivcrcros, Kapiraaos, aivSwv. 
 
 4 vafSAa, Kivvpa, aafifivKri, &C.
 
 THE TALMUD. 43 
 
 conceptions of the daily phenomena, which had penetrated 
 even into the cry of the watchmen, the password of the 
 temple-guards, and the routine-formula of the levitical 
 functionary. Unfortunately, it was too poetical at times. 
 Matters of a purely metaphysical nature, which afterwards 
 grew into dogmas through its vague phraseology, assumed 
 very monstrous shapes indeed. But it had become in the 
 hands of the people a mongrel idiom ; and, though gifted 
 with a fine feeling for the distinguishing characters of each 
 of the languages then in common use (" Aramaic lends itself 
 best to elegies, Greek to hymns, Hebrew to prayer, Koman 
 to martial compositions," as a common saying has it), they 
 yet mixed them all up, somewhat in the manner of the 
 Pennsylvanians of to-day. After all, it was but the faithful 
 reflex of those who made this idiom an enduring language. 
 These " Masters of the Law " formed the most mixed 
 assembly in the world. There were not only natives of all 
 the parts of the world-wide Eoman empire among them, but 
 also denizens of Arabia and India ; a fact which accounts for 
 many phenomena in the Talmud. But there is hardly any- 
 thing of domestic or public purport, which was not called 
 either by its Greek or Latin name, or by both, and generally 
 in so questionable a shape, and in such obsolete forms, that 
 both classical and Semitic scholars have often need to go 
 through a whole course of archaeology and antiquities before 
 unravelling it. 1 Save only one province, that of agriculture. 
 This alone, together with some other trades, had retained 
 the old homely Semitic words: thereby indicating, not, as- 
 
 1 Greek or Latin, or both, were the I their head they wore a pileus, and 
 
 terms commonly employed by them i they girded themselves with a £d>vr]. 
 
 for the table {rpaire^a, tabula, rpi- i The words sandalium, solea, soleus r 
 
 aKe\7]s, Tpiirovs), the chair, the bench, | talaria, impilia, indicate the footgear, 
 
 the cushion (subsellium, accubitum), j Ladies adorned themselves with the 
 
 the room in which they lived and catella, cochlear, irSpir-q, and other 
 
 slept (koWwv, evv-f), efeSpo), the cup sorts of rings and bracelets, ami in 
 
 (cyathus, phiala potoria) out of which general whatever appertained to a 
 
 they drank, the eating and drinking 
 itself (cenogarum, collyra, irapoipis, 
 yXevKos, acraton, opsonium, &c). Of 
 their dress we have the <xro\7], sagum, 
 dalmatica, braccse, chirodota. On 
 
 Greek or Komau lady's fine apparel. 
 Among the arms which the men wore 
 are mentioned the \6y\y, the spear, 
 the jua'xoipa (a word found in Genesis), 
 the pngio.
 
 44 THE TALMUD. 
 
 ignorance might be led to conclude, that the nation was 
 averse to it, but exactly the contrary: that from the early 
 days of Joshua they bad never ceased to cherish the thought 
 of sitting under their own vine and fig-tree. We refer for 
 this point to the idyllic picture given in the Mishnah of the 
 procession that went up to Jerusalem with the first-fruits, 
 accompanied by the sound of the flute, the sacrificial bull 
 with gilt horns and an olive-garland round his head proudly 
 marching in front. 
 
 The Talmud does, indeed, offer us a perfect picture of the 
 (Cosmopolitanism and luxury of those final days of Rome, 
 such as but few classical or postclassical writings contain. 
 We find mention made of Spanish fish, of Cretan apples, 
 Bithynian cheese, Egyptian lentils and beans, Greek and 
 Egyptian pumpkins, Italian wine, Median beer, Egyptian 
 Zyphus: garments were imported from Pelusium and India, 
 shirts from Cilicia, and veils from Arabia. To the Arabic, 
 Persian, and Indian materials contained, in addition to these, 
 in the Gemara, a bare allusion may suffice. So much we 
 venture to predict, that when once archaeological and lin- 
 guistic science shall turn to this field, they will not leave it 
 again soon. 
 
 We had long pondered over the best way of illustrating to 
 our readers the extraordinary manner in which the "Hag- 
 gadah," that second current of the Talmud, of which we 
 spoke in the introduction, suddenly interrupts the course of 
 the " Ilalacha," — when we bethought ourselves of the device 
 •of an old master. It was a hot Eastern afternoon, and while 
 he Mas expounding some intricate subtlety of the law, his 
 hearers quietly fell away in drowsy slumbers. All of a 
 sudden he burst out : " There was once a woman in Egypt 
 who brought forth at one birth six hundred thousand men." 
 And our readers may fancy how his audience started up at 
 this remarkable tale of the prolific Egyptian woman. Her 
 name, the master calmly proceeded, was Jochebed, and she 
 was the mother of Moses, who was worth as much as all 
 those six hundred thousand armed men together who went 
 up from Egypt. The Professor then, after a brief legendary
 
 THE TALMUD. 45 
 
 digression, proceeded with his legal intricacies, and his 
 hearers slept no more that afternoon. An Eastern mind 
 seems peculiarly constituted. Its passionate love for things 
 wise and witty, for stories and tales, for parables and 
 apologues, does not leave it even in its most severe studies. 
 They are constantly needed, it would appear, to keep the 
 current of its thoughts in motion ; they are the playthings 
 of the grown-up children of the Orient. The Haggadah, too, 
 has an exegesis, a system, a method of its own. They are 
 peculiar, fantastic things. We would rather not follow too 
 closely its learned divisions into homiletical, ethical, his- 
 torical, general and special Haggadah. 
 
 The Haggadah in general transforms Scripture, as we said, 
 into a thousand themes for its variations. Everything being- 
 bound up in the Bible — the beginning and the end — there 
 must be an answer in it to all questions. Eind the key, and. 
 all the riddles in it are solved. The persons of the Bible — 
 the kings and the patriarchs, the heroes and. the prophets, 
 the women and the children, what they did and suffered, 
 their happiness and their doom, their words and their lives. 
 — became, apart from their presupposed historical reality, 
 a symbol and an allegory. And what the narrative had 
 omitted, the Haggadah supplied in many variations. It filled 
 up these gaps, as a prophet looking into the past might do ; it 
 explained the motives ; it enlarged the story ; it found con- 
 nections between the remotest countries, ages, and people, 
 often with a startling realism ; it drew sublime morals 
 from the most commonplace facts. Yet it did all this by 
 quick and sudden motions, to us most foreign ; and hence the 
 frequent misunderstanding of its strange and wayward moods. 
 
 Passing strange, indeed, are the ways of this Prophetess of 
 the Exile, who appears wherever and whenever she listetb, 
 and disappears as suddenly. Well can we understand the 
 distress of mind in a medieval divine, or even in a modern 
 savant, who, bent upon following the most subtle windings of 
 some scientific debate in the Talmudical pages — geometrical, 
 botanical, financial, or otherwise — as it revolves round the 
 Sabbath journey, the raising of seeds, the computation oi
 
 46 THE TALMUD. 
 
 .tithes and taxes — feels, as it were, the ground suddenly 
 give way. The loud voices grow thin, the doors and walls of 
 the school-room vanish before his eyes, and in their place 
 uprises Rome the Great, the Urbs et Orbis, and her million- 
 voiced life. Or the blooming vineyards round that other 
 City of Hills, Jerusalem the Golden herself, are seen, and 
 white-clad virgins move dreamily among them. Snatches of 
 their songs are heard, the rhythm of their choric dances rises 
 and falls : it is the most dread Day of Atonement itself, 
 which, in poetical contrast, was chosen by the " Rose of 
 Sharon " as a day of rejoicing to walk among those waving 
 lily-fields and vine-clad slopes. Or the clarion of rebellion 
 rings high and shrill through the complicated debate, and 
 Belshazzar, the story of whose ghastly banquet is told with 
 all the additions of maddening horror, is doing service for 
 Nero the bloody ; or Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian tyrant, 
 and all his hosts, are cursed with a yelling curse — a jproj)os 
 of some utterly inappropriate legal point; while to the 
 initiated he stands for Titus the — at last exploded — "Delight 
 of Humanity." The symbols and hieroglyphs of the Hag- 
 gadah, when fully explained some day, will indeed form a 
 very curious contribution to the unwritten history of man. 
 Often — far too often for the interests of study and the glory 
 of the human race — does the steady tramp of the Roman 
 cohort, the pass-word of the revolution, the shriek and 
 clangour of the bloody field, interrupt these debates, and the 
 arguing masters and disciples don their arms, and, with the 
 cry " Jerusalem and Liberty," rush to the fray. 
 
 Those who look with an eye of disfavour upon all these 
 extraneous matters as represented by the Haggaclah in the 
 Talmud — the fairy tales and the jests, the stories and the 
 parables, and all that strange agglomeration of foreign 
 things crystallized around the legal kernel — should remem- 
 ber, above all, one fact. As this tangled mass lies before us, 
 it represents at best a series of photographic slides, half 
 broken, mutilated and faded : though what remains of them 
 is startlingly faithful to the original. As the disciple had 
 retained, in his memory or his quick notes, the tenor of the
 
 THE TALMUD. 47 
 
 single debates, interspersed with the thousand allusions, 
 reminiscences, apergus, facts, quotations, and the rest, so he 
 perpetuated it — sometimes well, sometimes ill. If well, we 
 have a feeling as if, after a long spell of musings or pon- 
 derings, we were trying to retrace the course of our ideas — 
 and the most incongruous things spring up and disappear, 
 apparently without rhyme or reason. And yet there is a 
 deep significance and connection in them. Creeping or 
 flying, melodious or grating, they carry us on ; and there is 
 just this difference iu the Talmudical wanderings, that they 
 never lose themselves. Suddenly, when least expected, the 
 original question is repeated, together with the answer, 
 distilled as it were out of these thousand foreign things of 
 which we did not always see the drift. If ill reported, the 
 page becomes like a broken dream, a half- transparent pa- 
 limpsest. Would it perhaps have been better if a wise 
 discretion had guided the hands of the first redactors ? We 
 think not. The most childish of trifles, found in an Assyrian 
 mound, is of value to him who understands such things, and 
 who from them may deduce a number of surprisingly im- 
 portant results. 
 
 We shall devote the brief space that remains, to this Hag- 
 gadah. And for a general picture of it we shall refer to 
 Bunyan, who, speaking of his own book, which — mutatis 
 ■mutandis — is very Haggadistic, unknowingly describes the 
 Haggadah as accurately as can be : — 
 
 " . . . . Would'st thou divert thyself from melancholy ? 
 Would'st thou he pleasant, yet he far from folly ? 
 Would'st thou read riddles and their explanation ? 
 Or else be drowned in thy contemplation? 
 Dost thou love picking meat? Or would'st thou see 
 A man i' the clouds, and hear him speak to thee ? 
 Would'st thou he in a dream, and yet not sleep ? 
 Or, would'st thou in a moment laugh and weep ? 
 Would'st lose thyself, and catch no harm ? 
 And find thyself again without a charm ? 
 Would'st read thyself, and read thou know'st not what ? 
 And yet know whether thou art hlest or not 
 P>y reading the same lines ? then come hither, 
 And lay this book, thy head and heart together "
 
 48 Tin-: talmud. 
 
 We would not reproach those who, often with the best 
 intentions in the world, have brought almost the entire 
 Eaggadistic province into disrepute. We really do not 
 wonder that the so-called "rabbinical stories," that have 
 from time to time been brought before the English public, 
 have not met with the most flattering reception. The 
 Talmud, which has a drastic word for every occasion, says, 
 " They dived into an ocean, and brought up a potsherd." 
 First of all, these stories form only a small item in the vast 
 mass of allegories, parables, and the like, that make up the 
 Haggadah. And they were partly ill-chosen, partly badly 
 rendered, and partly did not even belong to the Talmud, but 
 to some recent Jewish story-book. Herder— to name the 
 most eminent judge of the " Poetry of Peoples," — has 
 extolled what he saw of the genuine specimens, in transcen- 
 dental terms. And, in truth, not only is the entire world of 
 pious biblical legend which Islam has said and sung in its 
 manv tongues, to the delight of the wise and simple for 
 twelve centuries, now to be found either in embryo or fully 
 developed in the Haggadah, but much that is familiar 
 among ourselves in the circles of medieval sagas, in Dante, 
 in Boccaccio, in Cervantes, in Milton, in Bunyan, has con- 
 sciously or unconsciously flowed out of this w r ondrous realnu 
 the Haggadah. That much of it is overstrained, even ac- 
 cording to Eastern notions, we do not deny. But there are 
 feeble passages even in Homer and Shakspeare, and there 
 are always people with a happy instinct of picking out the 
 weakest portions of a work; while even the best pages of 
 Shakspeare and Homer are apt to be spoiled by awkward 
 manipulation. At the same time we are far from advising 
 a wholesale translation of these Haggadistic productions. 
 Nothing could be more tedious than a continuous course of 
 such reading, though choice bits from them would satisfy 
 even the most fastidious critic. And such bits, scattered 
 through the Talmud, are delightfully refreshing. 
 
 It is, unfortunately, not in our power to indicate any 
 specimens of its strikingly keen interpretations, of its 
 gorgeous dreams, its —
 
 THE TALMUD. 49 
 
 <c Beautiful old stories, 
 Tales of angels, fairy legends, 
 Stilly histories of martyrs, 
 Festal songs and words of wisdom ; 
 Hyperboles, most quaint it may be, 
 Yet replete with strength, and fire, 
 And faith — how they gleam, 
 And glow and glitter ! . . ." 
 
 &s Heine has it. 
 
 It seems of more moment to call attention to an entirely 
 new branch of investigation, namely, Talmudical metaphysics 
 and ethics, such as may be gleaned from the Haggadah, of 
 which we shall now take a brief glance. 
 
 Beginning with the Creation, we find the gradual develop- 
 Tnent of the Cosmos fully developed by the Talmud. It 
 •assumes destruction after destruction, stage after stage. And 
 in their quaintly ingenious manner the Masters refer to the 
 verse in G-enesis, " And God saw all that he had made, and 
 behold it was very good," and to that other in Eccles. iii. 1L 
 "" God created everything in its proper season ;" and argue 
 ■" He created worlds upon worlds, and destroyed them one 
 after the other, until He created this world. He then said, 
 ■" This pleases me, the others did not ;" — " in its proper 
 season" — " it was not meet to create this world until now." 
 
 The Talmud assumes some original substance, itself created 
 by God, out of which the Universe was shaped. There is a 
 perceptible leaning to the early Greek schools. " One or 
 three things were before this world: Water, Fire, and Wind: 
 Water begat the Darkness, Fire begat Light, and Wind 
 begat the Spirit of Wisdom." The How of the creation 
 was not even matter of speculation. The co-operation of 
 angels, whose existence was warranted by Scripture, and a 
 whole hierarchy of whom had been built up under Persian 
 influences, was distinctly denied. In a discussion about the 
 day of their creation it is agreed, on all hands, that there 
 were no angels at first, " lest men might say ' Michael 
 spanned out the firmament on the south, and Gabriel to the 
 north.' " There is a distinct foreshadowing of the gnostic 
 Demiurgos — that antique link between the Divine Spirit and 
 the World of Matter — to be found in the Talmud. What 
 
 E
 
 50 THE TALMUD. 
 
 with riato were the Ideas, with Philo the Logos, with the 
 Kabbalists the " World of Aziluth," what the Gnostics called 
 more emphatically the wisdom (crocf)la) or power (Svpafiis), 
 and Plotinus the vovs, that the Talmndical Authors call 
 Metatron. 1 The angels — whose names, according to the 
 Talmud itself, the Jews brought back from Babylon — play, 
 after the exile, a very different part from those before the 
 exile. They are, in fact, more or less Persian : as are also 
 for the most part all incantations, the magical cures, the 
 sidereal influences, and the rest of the " heathen " elements 
 contained in the Talmud! Even the number of the Angelic 
 Princes is seven, like that of the Amesha-Qpentas, and their 
 Hebrew names and their functions correspond, as nearly as 
 can be, to those of their Persian prototypes, who, on their 
 own part, have only at this moment been discovered to be 
 merely allegorical names for God's supreme qualities. Much 
 as the Talmudical authorities inveigh against those " heathen 
 ways," sympathetic cures, the exorcisms of demons, the 
 charms, and the rest, the working of miracles, very much in 
 vogue in those days, yet they themselves were drawn into 
 large concessions to angels and demons. Besides the seven 
 Angel Princes, there are hosts of ministering angels — the 
 Persian Yazatas — whose functions, besides that of being- 
 messengers, are twofold ; to praise God and to be guardians of 
 man. In their first capacity they are daily created by God's 
 breath out of a stream of fire that rolls its waves under the di- 
 vine throne. As guardian angels (Persian Fravashis) two of 
 them accompany every man, and for every new good deed man 
 acquires a new guardian angel, who always watches over his 
 steps. When the righteous dies, three hosts of angels meet 
 him. One says (in the words of Scripture) " He shall go in 
 peace," the second takes up the strain and says, " Who has 
 walked in righteousness," and the third concludes, " Let him 
 come in peace and rest upon his bed." If the wicked leaves 
 the world, three hosts of wicked angels come to meet him. 2 
 
 1 This name is most probably no- I twecn men and angels, or rather 
 thing but Mithra. j personified passions — which flou- 
 
 2 This science of angels and demons | rished very vigorously at the begin- 
 (J&hedim = Pera. Daevas) — links be- j ning of Christianity, is, altogether,
 
 THE TALMUD. 51 
 
 With regard to the providential guidance of the Universe, 
 this was in God's hand alone. As He is the sole Creator 
 and Legislator, so also is He the sole arbiter of destinies. 
 " Every nation," the Talmud says, " has its special guardian 
 angel, its horoscopes, its ruling planets and stars. But there 
 is no planet for Israel. Israel shall look but to Him. There 
 is no mediator between those who are called His children, 
 and their Father which is in Heaven." The Jerusalem 
 Talmud — written under the direct influence of Eoman 
 manners and customs, has the following parable : " A man 
 has a patron. If some evil happens to him, he does not 
 enter suddenly into the presence of this patron, but he goes 
 and stands at the door of his house. He does not ask for the 
 patron, but for his favourite slave, or his son, who then goes 
 and tells the master inside: The man N. N. is standing at 
 the gate of the hall, shall he come in or not ? — Not so the 
 Holy, praised be He. If misfortune comes upon a man, let 
 him not cry to Michael and not to Gabriel, but unto Me 
 let him cry, and I will answer him right speedily — as it is 
 said, Every one who shall call on the name of the Lord 
 shall be saved." 
 
 The end and aim of Creation is man, who, therefore, was 
 created last, " when everything w r as ready for his reception." 
 When he has reached the perfection of virtue " he is higher 
 than the angels themselves." 
 
 Miracles are considered by the Talmud — much as Leibnitz 
 regards all the movements of every limb of our body — as 
 only possible through a sort of " prestabilitated harmony," 
 i.e., the course of creation was not disturbed by them, but 
 they were all primevally " existing," " pre-ordained." They 
 were " created " at the end of all other things, in the 
 gloaming of the sixth day. Among them, however, was — 
 and this will interest our palaeographers — also the art of 
 writing : an invention considered beyond all arts : nothing- 
 short of a miracle. Creation, together with these so-called 
 exceptions, once established, nothing could be altered in it. 
 
 one of the most interesting, particu- 
 larly with regard to the striking 
 parallels it offers between Judaism, 
 
 Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrian- 
 ism : but we forbear to enlarge upon 
 it. 
 
 E 2
 
 52 THE TALMUD. 
 
 The Laws of Nature went on by their own immutable force, 
 however much evil might spring therefrom. " These wicked 
 ones not only vulgarize my coin," says the Haggadah with 
 reference to the propagation of the evil-doers and their kin, 
 bearing the human face divine, " but they actually make me 
 impress base coin with my own stamp." 
 
 God's real name is ineffable ; but there are many designa- 
 tions indicative of his qualities, such as the Merciful (Bach- 
 man, a name of frequent occurrence both in the Koran and 
 in the Talmud), the Holy One, the Place, the Heavens, the 
 Word, Our Father which is in Heaven, the Almighty, 
 the Sheehinah, or Sacred Presence. 
 
 The doctrine of the soul bears more the impress of the 
 Platonic than of the Aristotelian school. It is held to be 
 pre-existing. All souls that are ever to be united to bodies 
 have been created once for all, and are hidden away from 
 the first moment of creation. They, being creatures of the 
 highest realms, are cognizant of all things, but, at the hour 
 of their birth in a human body, an angel touches the mouth 
 of the child, which causes it to forget all that has been. 
 Very striking is the comparison between the soul and God, 
 -a comparison which has an almost pantheistic look. " As 
 God fills the whole universe," says the Haggadah, "so the 
 soul fills the whole body; as God sees and is not seen, so 
 the soul sees and is not seen ; as God nourishes the whole 
 universe, so the soul nourishes the whole body ; as God is 
 pure, so the soul is pure." This purity is specially dwelt 
 upon in contradistinction to the theory of hereditary sin, 
 which is denied. " There is no death without individual 
 sin, no pain without individual transgression. That same 
 spirit that dictated in the Pentateuch : ' And parents shall 
 not die for their children, nor the children for their parents,' 
 has ordained that no one should be punished for another's 
 transgressions." In the judgment on sin the animus is taken 
 into consideration. The desire to commit the vice is held to 
 be more wicked than the vice itself. 
 
 The fear of God, or a virtuous life, the whole aim and end 
 of a man's existence, is entirely in man's hand. "Every- 
 thing is in God's hand save the fear of God." But " one
 
 THE TALMUD. 53 
 
 hour of repentance is better than the whole world to come." 
 The fullest liberty is granted in this respect to every human 
 being, though the help of God is necessary for carrying it out. 
 
 The dogma of the Resurrection and of Immortality, 
 vaguely indicated in the various parts of the Old Testament, 
 has been fixed by the Talmud, and traced to several biblical 
 passages. Various are the similes by which the relation of 
 this world to the world to come is indicated. This world is 
 like unto a " Prosdora " to the next : " Prepare thyself in 
 the hall, that thou mayest be admitted into the palace :" or 
 " This world is like a roadside inn (hospitium), but the 
 world to come is like the real home." The righteous are 
 represented as perfecting themselves and developing all 
 their highest faculties even in the next world ; " for the 
 righteous there is no rest, neither in this world nor in 
 the next, for they go, say the Scriptures, from host to host, 
 from striving to striving : — they will see God in Zion." How 
 all its deeds and the hour when they were committed are 
 unfolded to the sight of the departed soul, the terrors of the 
 grave, the rolling back to Jerusalem on the day of the great 
 trumpet, we need not here tell in detail. These half-meta- 
 physical half-mystical speculations are throughout in the 
 manner of the more poetical early Church fathers of old and 
 of Bunyan in our times. Only the glow of imagination 
 and the conciseness of language in which they are mostly 
 told in the Talmud contrast favourably with the verboseness 
 of later times. The Resurrection is to take place by the 
 mystic power of the "Dew of Life " in Jerusalem — on Mount 
 Olivet, add the Targums. 
 
 There is no everlasting damnation according to the 
 Talmud. There is only a temporary punishment even for 
 the worst sinners. " Generations upon generations " shall 
 last the damnation of idolaters, apostates, and traitors. But 
 there is a space of " only two lingers' breadth between Hell 
 and Heaven \' } the sinner has but to repent sincerely and the 
 gates to everlasting bliss will spring open. No human being 
 is excluded from the world to come. Every man, of what- 
 ever creed or nation, provided he be of the righteous, shall 
 be admitted into it. The punishment of the wicked is not
 
 54 THE TALMUD. 
 
 specified, as indeed all the descriptions of the next world are 
 left vague, yet, with regard to Paradise, the idea of some- 
 thing inconceivably glorious is conveyed at every step. The 
 passage, " Eye has not seen nor has ear heard," is applied to 
 its unspeakable bliss. " In the next world there will be 
 no eating, no drinking, no love and no labour, no envy, no 
 hatred, no contest. The Righteous will sit with crowns on 
 their heads, glorying in the Splendour of God's Majesty." 
 
 The essence of prophecy gives rise to some speculation. 
 One decisive Talmudical dictum is, that God does not cause 
 his spirit to rest upon any one but a strong, wise, rich, and 
 humble man. Strong and rich are in the Mishnah explained 
 in this wise : " Who is strong ? He who subdues his passion. 
 Who is rich ? He who is satisfied with his lot." There are 
 degrees among prophets. Moses saw everything clearly ; 
 the other prophets as in dark mirrors. " Ezekiel and Isaiah 
 say the same things, but Isaiah like a town-bred man, 
 Ezekiel like a villager." The prophet's word is to be obeyed 
 in all things, save when he commands the worship of idolatry. 
 The notion of either Elijah or Moses having in reality as- 
 cended " to Heaven " is utterly repudiated, as well as that of 
 the Deity (Shechinah) having descended from Heaven "more 
 than ten hands' breadth." 
 
 The " philosophy of religion " will be best comprehended 
 by some of those " small coins," the popular and pithy 
 sayings, gnomes, proverbs, and the rest, which, even better 
 than street songs, characterise a time. With these we shall 
 conclude. We have thought it preferable to give them at 
 random as we found them, instead of building up from them 
 a system of "Ethics " or "Duties of the Heart." We have 
 naturally preferred the better and more characteristic ones 
 that came in our way. We may add — a remark perhaps not 
 quite superfluous — that the following specimens, as well as 
 the quotations which we have given in the course of this 
 article, have been all translated by us, as literally as possible, 
 from the Talmud itself. 1 
 
 1 With regard to the strikin Q 
 parallels exhibited by them to some 
 
 ( impels, we disclaim any intention of 
 having purposely selected them. It is 
 
 >f the most sublime dicta of the utterly impossible to read a page of
 
 THE TALMUD. 55 
 
 " Be thou the cursed, not he who curses. Be of them that are persecuted, 
 not of them that persecute. Look at Scripture : there is not a single bird 
 more persecuted than the dove ; yet God has chosen her to be offered up 
 on his altar. The bull is hunted by the lion, the sheep by the wolf, the 
 goat by the tiger. And God said, ' Bring me a sacrifice, not from them 
 that persecute, but from them that are persecuted.' — We read (Ex. xvii. 11) 
 that while, in the contest with Amalek, Moses lifted up his arms, Israel 
 prevailed. Did Moses's hands make war or break war ? But this is to 
 tell you that as long as Israel are looking upwards and humbling their 
 hearts before their Father which is in Heaven, they prevail ; if not, they 
 fall. In the same way you find (Num. xxi. 9), ' And Moses made a 
 serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole : and it came to pass, that if 
 a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he 
 lived.' Dost think that a serpent killeth or giveth life ? But as long as 
 Israel are looking upwards to their Father which is in Heaven they will 
 live ; if not, they Avill die. — ' Has God pleasure in the meat and blood 
 of sacrifices ? ' asks the prophet. No ; He has not so much ordained as 
 permitted them. It is for yourselves, he says, not for me that you offer. 
 Like a king, who sees his son carousing daily with all manner of evil 
 companions : You shall henceforth eat and drink entirely at your will at 
 my own table, he says. They offered sacrifices to demons and devils, for 
 they loved sacrificing, and could not do without it. And the Lord said, 
 * Bring your offerings to Me ; you shall then at least offer to the true 
 God.' — Scripture ordains that the Hebrew slave who ' loves ' his bondage, 
 shall have his ear pierced against the door-post. Why? because it is 
 that ear which heard on Sinai, ' They are My servants, they shall not be 
 sold as bondsmen : ' — They are My servants, not servant's servants. And 
 this man voluntarily throws away his precious freedom — ' Pierce his ear ! ' 
 — ' He who sacrifices a whole offering, shall be rewarded for a whole 
 offering ; he who offers a burnt-offering, shall have the reward of a burnt- 
 offering ; but he who offers humility unto God and man, shall be rewarded 
 with a reward as if he had offered all the sacrifices in the world.' — The 
 child loves its mother more than its father. It fears its father more than 
 its mother. See how the Scripture makes the father precede the mother 
 in the injunction, ' Thou' shalt love thy father and thy mother ; ' and the 
 mother, when it says, ' Honour thy mother and thy father.' — Bless God 
 for the good as well as the evil. When you hear of a death say, ' Blessed 
 is the righteous Judge.' — Even when the gates of heaven are shut to 
 prayer, they are open to those of tears. — Prayer is Israel's only weapon, a 
 weapon inherited from its fathers, a weapon tried in a thousand battles. — 
 When the righteous dies, it is the earth that loses. The lost jewel will always 
 
 the Talmud and of the New Testa- redacted at a later period. To assume 
 ment without coming upon innume- that the Talmud has borrowed from 
 rable instances of this kind, as indeed j the New Testament would be like 
 they constantly seem to supplement assuming that Sanskrit sprang from 
 each other. We need not urge the j Latin, or that French was developed 
 priority of the Talmud to the New , from the Norman words found in 
 Testament, although the former was : English.
 
 56 THE TALMUD. 
 
 be a jewel, but the possessor who has lost it — well may he weep. — Life is 
 a passing shadow, says the Scripture. Is it the shadow of a tower, of a 
 tree? A shadow that prevails for a while? No, it is the shadow of a bird 
 in his flight — away flies the bird and there is neither bird nor shadow. — 
 Repent one day before thy death. There was a king who bade all his 
 servants to a great repast, but did not indicate the hour : some went home 
 and put on their best garments and stood at the door of the palace ; others- 
 said, There is ample time, the king will let us know beforehand. But the 
 king summoned them of a sudden ; and those that came in their best 
 garments were well received, but the foolish ones, who came in their, 
 slovenliness, were turned away in disgrace. Repent to-day, lest to-morrow 
 ye might be summoned. — The aim and end of all wisdom are repentance 
 and good works. — Even the most righteous shall not attain to so high a 
 place in Heaven as the truly repentant. — The reward of good works is like 
 dates : sweet and ripening late. — The dying benediction of a sage to his- 
 disciples was : I pray for you that the fear of Heaven may be as strong, 
 upon you as the fear of man. You avoid sin before the face of the latter i 
 avoid it before the face of the All-seeing. — ' If your God hates idolatry, 
 why does he not destroy it?' a heathen asked. And they answered him : 
 Behold, they worship the sun, the moon, the stars ; would you have him 
 destroy this beautiful world for the sake of the foolish ? — If your God is a 
 4 friend of the poor,' asked another, why does he not support them ? Their 
 case, a sage answered, is left in our hands, that we may thereby acquire 
 merits and forgiveness of sin. But what a merit it is! the other replied ; 
 suppose I am angry with one of my slaves, and forbid him food and drink, 
 and some one goes and gives it him furtively, shall I be much pleased % i 
 Not so, the other replied. Suppose you are wroth with your only son and 
 imprison him without food, and some good man has pity on the child, 
 and saves him from the pangs of hunger, would you be so very angry 
 with the man ? And we, if we are called servants of God, are also called 
 his children. — 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 ; whilst he whose works are greater than his knowledge is like a tree 
 with many roots and fewer branches, but which all the winds of heaven 
 cannot uproot. 
 
 "Love your wife like yourself, honour her more than yourself. "Who- 
 soever lives unmarried, lives without joy, without comfort, without 
 blessing. Descend a step in choosing a wife. If thy wife is small, bend 
 down to her and whisper into her ear. He who forsakes 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 — 
 around him the world grows dark. It is woman alone through whom 
 God's blessings are vouchsafed to a house. She teaches the children, 
 speeds the husband to the place of worship and instruction, welcomes him 
 when he returns, keeps the house godly and pure, and God's blessings rest 
 upon all these things. He who marries for money, his children shall be 
 a curse to him. — The house that does not open to the poor shall open to 
 the physician. The birds in the air even despise the miser. He who gives-
 
 THE TALMUD. 57 
 
 charity in secret is greater than Moses himself. Honour the sons of the 
 poor, it is they who bring science into splendour. — Let the honour of thy 
 neighbour be to thee like thine own. Rather be thrown into a fiery 
 furnace than bring any one to public shame. — Hospitality is the most 
 important part of Divine worship. There are three crowns : of the law, 
 the priesthood, the kingship ; but the crown of a good name is greater 
 than them all. — Iron breaks the stone, fire melts iron, water extinguishes 
 fire, the clouds drink up the water, a storm drives away the clouds, man 
 withstands the storm, fear unmans man, wine dispels fear, sleep drives 
 away wine, and death sweeps all away — even sleep. But Solomon the 
 Wise says : Charity saves from Death. — How can you escape sin? Think 
 of three things : whence thou comest, whither thou goest, and to whom 
 thou wilt have to account for all thy deeds : even to the King of Kings, 
 the All Holy, praised be He. — Four shall not enter Paradise : the scoffer,, 
 the liar, the hypocrite, and the slanderer. To slander is to murder. — The 
 cock and the x>wl both await the daylight. The light, says the cock, 
 brings delight to me, but what are you waiting for? — When the thief 
 has no oppportunity for stealing, he considers himself an honest man. — - 
 If thy friends agree in calling thee an ass, go and get a halter around 
 thee. — Thy friend has a friend, and thy friend's friend has a friend : 
 be discreet. — The dog sticks to you on account of the crumbs in your 
 pocket. — He in whose family there has been one hanged should not say to 
 his neighbour, Pray hang this little fish up for me. — The camel wanted 
 to have horns, and they took away his ears. — The soldiers fight, and the 
 kings are the heroes. — The thief invokes God while he breaks into the 
 house. — The woman of sixty will run after music like one of six. — After 
 the thief runs the theft ; after the beggar, poverty. — While thy foot is 
 shod, smash the thorn. — When the ox is down, many are the butchers. — 
 Descend a step in choosing a wife, mount a step in choosing a friend. — If 
 there is anything bad about you, say it yourself. — Luck makes rich, luck 
 makes wise. — Beat the gods, and the priests will tremble. Were it not 
 for the existence of passions, no one would build a house, marry a wife, 
 beget children, or do any work. — 'The sun will go down all by himself, 
 without your assistance. — The world could not well get on without 
 perfumers and without tanners : but woe unto the tanner, well to the 
 perfumer ! — Fools are no proof. — Xo man is to be made responsible for 
 words which he utters in his grief. — One eats, another says grace. — He 
 who is ashamed will not easily commit sin. There is a great difference 
 between him who is ashamed before his own self and him who is only 
 ashamed before others. It is a good sign in man to be capable of being 
 ashamed. One contrition in man's heart is better than many flagellations. — 
 If our ancestors were like angels, we are like men; if our ancestors were 
 like men, we are like asses. — Do not live near a pious fool. — If you wish 
 to hang yourself, choose a big tree. — Rather eat onions and sit in the 
 shadow, and do not eat geese and poultry if it makes thy heart uneasy 
 within thee. — A small stater (coin) in a large jar makes a big noise. A 
 myrtle, even in a desert, remains a myrtle. — When the pitcher falls upon 
 the stone, woe unto the pitcher; when the stone falls upon the pitcher,.
 
 58 THE TALMUD. 
 
 woe unto the pitcher: whatever befalls, woe unto the pitcher. — Even if 
 the bull have his head deep in his trough, hasten upon the roof, and drag 
 the ladder after you. — Get your living by skinning carcases in the street, 
 if you cannot otherwise, and do not say, I am a priest, I am a great man ; 
 this work would not befit my dignity. — Youth is a garland of roses, age is 
 a crown of thorns. — Use a noble vase even for one day — let it break to- 
 morrow. — The last thief is hanged first. — Teach thy tongue to say, I do 
 not know. — The heart of our first ancestors was as large as the largest gate 
 of the Temple, that of the later ones like that of the next large one ; ours 
 is like the eye of a needle. — Drink not, and you will not sin. — Not what 
 you say about yourself, but what others say. — Not the place honours the 
 man, but the man the place. — The cat and the rat make peace over a 
 carcase. — A dog away from his native kennel dares not bark for seven 
 years. — He who walks daily over his estates finds a little coin each time. 
 — He who humiliates himself will be lifted up; he who raises himself up 
 will be humiliated. Whosoever runs after greatness, greatness runs away 
 from him ; he who runs from greatness, greatness follows him. — He w T ho 
 •curbs his wrath, his sins will be forgiven. — Whosoever does not persecute 
 them that persecute him, whosoever takes an offence in silence, he who 
 does good because of love, he who is cheerful under his sufferings — they 
 are the friends of God, and of them the Scripture says, And they shall 
 shine forth as does the sun at noonday. — Pride is like idolatry. Commit 
 a sin twice, and you will think it perfectly allowable. — When the end of 
 a man is come, everybody lords it over him. — While our love was strong, 
 avc lay on the edge of a sword ; now it is no longer strong, a sixty-yard- 
 wide bed is too narrow for us. — A Galilean said : When the shepherd is 
 angry with his flock, he appoints to it a blind bell-wether. — The day is 
 short and the work is great ; but the labourers are idle, though the reward 
 be great, and the master of the work presses. It is not incumbent upon 
 thee to 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." .... 
 
 Solemnly, as a warning and as a comfort, this adage 
 strikes on our ear: — "And it is not incumbent upon thee to 
 complete the work." When the Masters of the Law entered 
 and left the academy they used to offer up a short but 
 fervent prayer, in which we would fain join at this moment 
 — a prayer of thanks that they had been able to carry out 
 their task thus far ; and a prayer further " that no evil might 
 arise at their hands, that they might not have fallen into 
 error, that they might not declare pure that which was impure, 
 impure that which was pure, and that their words might be 
 pleasing and acceptable to God and to their fellow-men."
 
 ( 59 ) 
 II. 
 
 ISLAM. 
 
 The Sinaitic Manifestation, as recorded in the Pentateuch, 
 has become the theme of a thousand reflections in the 
 Talmud and the Haggadah generally. Yet, however varied 
 their nature — metaphysical, allegorical, ethical — one supreme 
 thought runs through thein all — the catholicity of Mono- 
 theism, its mission to all mankind. Addressed, apparently, 
 to a small horde of runaway slaves, the " Law," those funda- 
 mental outlines of religious and social culture, revealed on 
 Mount Sinai — " the lowliest of the range, to indicate that 
 God's Spirit rests on them only that are meek of heart " — ■ 
 was indeed intended, the Masters say, for all the children of 
 men. " Why," they ask, " was it given in the desert and 
 not in any king's land ? " — To show that even as the desert, 
 God's own highway, is free, wide open to all, even so are His 
 words a free gift to all ; like the sun, the moon, and the 
 stars. It was not given in the stillness and darkness of 
 night, but in plain day, amidst thunders and lightnings. In- 
 deed, it had been offered to all nations of the world before it 
 came to the " chosen one." But they, one and all, had 
 pointed to some special national bent or " mission " with 
 which one or the other of these commandments would have 
 interfered, and so they declined them all. And intensely 
 characteristic are some of the ethnological pleas put into 
 their mouths by the, at times, humorous Haggadah. As 
 for those trembling waifs and strays who, worn out with 
 
 1 This article appeared in the 
 ' Quarterly Review' for October. 1SG9, 
 vol. cxxvii., No. 254, p. 293, and re- 
 viewed the following works : — 1. ' The 
 Koran.' 2. ' The Talmud.' 3. ' The 
 Sunnah.' 4. 'The Midrash.' 5. 
 
 ' Mohammad.' By Sprenger. Alla- 
 habad, 1851. 8vo. Berlin, 3 vols., 
 1861-65. 8vo. 6. ' Life of Mahomet.' 
 Bv William Muir. i vols. London, 
 1858-61. 8vo.
 
 60 ISLAM. 
 
 " anguish of spirit and cruel bondage," a short while since 
 would not even listen to the message of Liberty, and who 
 now, scared with terrors and wonders, cried " We will obey 
 and hear!" — obey, as the old commentators keenly point 
 • •lit. unconditionally, whatever we may hear — to them no 
 choice had been left. Had they not accepted the " Law," - 
 that self-same mountain would have covered them up, and 
 that desert would have become their grave : — a dictum sig- 
 nificantly echoed by the Koran. 
 
 But — the Legend continues — when this Law came to be 
 revealed to them in the fulness of time, it was not revealed 
 in their tongue alone, but in seventy : as many as there were 
 nations counted on earth — even as many fiery tongues leap 
 forth from the iron upon the anvil. . . . And as the voice 
 went and came, echoing from Orient to Occident, from heaven 
 to earth, all Creation lay hushed in awful silence. No bird 
 sang in the air, the winds were still, the Seraphim paused in 
 their three times " Holy ! " " And all men," says Scripture, 
 " heard and saw." They " heard " the voice — and to each it 
 bore a different sound : to the men and the women, the 
 young and the old, the strong and the weak. It appeared 
 unto them like the voice of their fathers, their mothers, their 
 children, all those whom they loved with their holiest and 
 tenderest love. And they "saw." In that self-same hour 
 God's Majesty revealed Itself in its manifold moods and as- 
 pects : as Mercy and as Severity, as Justice and as Forgive- 
 ness, as Grace and Peace and Eedemption. And through 
 the midst of all these ever-varying sounds and visions there 
 rolled forth the Divine word, " I am the everlasting, Jehovah, 
 thy God, One God !".... 
 
 In these and similar strains the wide and all-embracing 
 nature of the Monotheistic creed and call is set forth in those 
 ancient documents to which we again venture to draw the 
 attention of our readers, and from a new point of view. If, 
 on a former occasion, we endeavoured to sketch out of them- 
 selves their own aim and purport, their poetry and their 
 prose, their law and their legend, we shall now endeavour to 
 show how they may be, and must be, utilised for the investi-
 
 ISLAM. 61 
 
 gation of phases of creed and thought apparently wide apart 
 in time and tendency and place ; how far they form one of 
 the most important sources — the most important one, perhaps 
 — of Islam. 
 
 We are not about to enter here into any " Origines Islam- 
 isrni." This lies, at present, beyond our task. But those 
 who would adequately work out the whole problem of the 
 Talmud — as far as it lies within individual range — must 
 needs look somewhat deeply into the story of these phases. 
 And with regard to Islam, it seems as if the knowledge of 
 its beginning and progress, its tenets and its lore, were not 
 quite as familiar as they might be to the world at large, 
 notably England, which " holds the gorgeous East in fee." 
 
 But before we proceed with our subject, which we shall 
 treat with all the reverence and all the freedom which belong 
 to Science in these our days, let us look back — but a few 
 centuries — and see what, for instance, the great theologians 
 and scholars of the time of the Reformation thought and said 
 of Islam ; of its doctrine and the preacher thereof. 
 
 Daniel's " Little Horn " betokens, according to Martin 
 Luther, Mohammed. But what are the Little Horn's Eyes ? 
 The Little Horn's Eyes, says he, mean " Mohammed's Al- 
 koran, or Law, wherewith he ruleth. In the which Law 
 there is nought but sheer human reason (eitel menschliche 
 Vernunft)." ..." For his Law," he reiterates, " teaches 
 nothing but that which human understanding and reason 
 may well like." . . . Wherefore — " Christ will come upon 
 him with fire and brimstone." When he wrote this — in his 
 " army sermon " against the Turks — in 1529, he had never 
 seen a Koran. " Brother Richard's " (Predigerordens) " Con- 
 futatio Alcoran," dated 1300, formed the exclusive basis of 
 his argument. But in Lent of 1540, he relates, a Latin 
 translation, though a very unsatisfactory one, fell into his 
 hands, and once more he returned to Brother Richard and 
 did his Refutation into German, supplementing his version 
 with brief but racy notes. This Brother Richard had, ac- 
 cording to his own account, gone in quest of knowledge to 
 " Babylon, that beautiful city of the Sarassins," and at Baby-
 
 62 ISLAM. 
 
 Ion he had learnt Arabic and been inured in the evil ways of 
 the Sarassins. When he had safely returned to his native 
 land, he set about combating the same. And this is his ex- 
 ordium : — " At the time of the Emperor Heraclius there 
 arose a man, yea, a Devil, and a firstborn child of Satan . . . 
 who wallowed in . . . and he was dealing in the Black Art, 
 and his name it was Maclmmet." . . . This work Luther 
 made known to his countrymen, by translating and com- 
 menting, prefacing and rounding it off by an epilogue. True 
 his notes amount to little more but an occasional " Oh fie, 
 for shame, you horrid Devil, you damned Mahomet ! " or, 
 " Oh Satan, Satan, you shall pay for that ! " or, " That's it, 
 Devils, Sarassins, Turks, it's all the same ! " or, "Here the 
 Devil smells a rat," or, briefly, " pfui Dich, Teufel ! "— 
 except when he modestly, with a query, suggests whether 
 those Assassins, who, according to his text, are regularly 
 educated to go out into the world in order to kill and slay 
 all Worldly Powers, may not, perchance, be the Gypsies or 
 the " Tattern " (Tartars) ; or when he breaks down with a 
 " Hie nescio quid dicat translator." His epilogue, however, 
 is devoted to a special disquisition as to whether Mohammed 
 or the Pope be worse. And in the twenty-second chapter of 
 this disquisition he has arrived at the final conclusion that, 
 after all, the Pope is worse, and that he and not Mohammed 
 is the real " Endechrist." " Wohlan" he winds up, " God 
 grant us His grace, and punish both the Pope and Moham- 
 med, together with their Devils. I have done my part as a 
 true prophet and teacher. Those who won't listen may leave 
 it alone." . . . 
 
 In similar strains speaks the learned and gentle Melanch- 
 thon. In an introductory epistle to a reprint of that same 
 Latin Koran which displeased Luther so much, he finds fault 
 with Mohammed, or rather, to use his own words, he thinks 
 that " Mohammed is inspired by Satan," because he " does 
 not explain what sin is," and further, since he " showeth not 
 the reason of human misery." He agrees with Luther about 
 the Little Horn: — though in another treatise he is rather 
 inclined to see in Mohammed both Gog and Magog. And
 
 ISLAM. 03 
 
 " Mokaniraed's sect," he says, " is altogether made up (con- 
 flata) of blasphemy, robbery, and shameful lusts." Nor does 
 it matter in the least what the Koran is all about. " Even 
 if there were anything less scurrilous in the book, it need 
 not concern us any more than the portents of the Egyptians, 
 who invoked snakes and cats. . . . Were it not that partly 
 this Mohammedan pest and partly the PojDe's idolatry have 
 long been leading us straight to wreck and ruin — may God 
 have Mercy upon some of us ! " . . . 
 
 Thereupon G-enebrard, on the Papal side, charged the Ger- 
 man Reformers, chiefly Luther, with endeavouring to intro- 
 duce Mohammedanism into the Christian world, and to take 
 over the whole clergy to that faith. Maracci is of opinion 
 that Mohammedanism and Lutheranism are not very dis- 
 similar — witness the iconoclastic tendencies of both ! More 
 systematically does Martinus Alphonsus Vivaldus marshal 
 up exactly thirteen points to prove that there is not a shadow 
 of difference between the two. Mohammed points to that 
 which is written down — so do these heretics. He has altered 
 the time of the fast — they abhor all fasts. He has changed 
 Sunday into Friday — they observe no feast at all. He re- 
 jects the worship of the Saints — so do these Lutherans. 
 Mohammed has no baptism — nor does Calvin consider such 
 requisite. They both allow divorce — and so forth. Where- 
 upon Belaud — only 150 years ago — turns round, not without 
 a smile on his eloquent lips, and wants to know how about 
 the prayers for the dead, which both Mohammed and the 
 Pope enjoin, the intercession of angels, likewise the visitiug 
 of the graves, the pilgrimages to the Holy Places, the fixed 
 fasts, the merit of works, and the rest of it. 
 
 If there be any true gauge of an age or a nation, it is the 
 manner in which such age or nation deals with religious 
 phases beyond the pale. We shall not follow here the vicis- 
 situdes of that discussion of which we have indicated a few 
 traits, nor the gradual change which came over European 
 opinion with regard to Islam and its founder. How the silly 
 curses of the Prideaux, and Spanheims, and D'Herbelots; 
 how their " wicked impostors," and " dastardly liars " and
 
 <;i 
 
 ISLAM. 
 
 " devils incarnate," and Behemoths and beasts and Korahs 
 and six hundred and sixty-sixes, gave room, step by step 
 almost, to more temperate protests, more civil names, less 
 outrageous misrepresentations of both the faith and the man: 
 until Goethe and Carlyle, on the one hand, and that modern 
 phalanx of investigators, the Sprenger, and Amari, and 
 Noldeke, and Muir, and Dozy, on the other, have taught the 
 world at large that Mohammedanism is a thing of vitality, 
 fraught with a thousand fruitful germs; and that Moham- 
 med, whatever view of his character (to use that vague word 
 for once) be held, has earned a place in the golden book of 
 Humanity. 
 
 There is, however, another view which, though more slowly, 
 yet as surely, is gaining ground in the consciousness, if not of 
 the world at large, yet of those who have looked somewhat 
 more closely into this matter. It is this, that Mohammed- 
 anism owes more to Judaism than either to Heathenism or 
 to Christianity. We would go a step further. It is not 
 merely parallelisms, reminiscences, allusions, technical terms, 
 and the like, of Judaism, its lore and dogma and ceremony, 
 its Halacha and its Haggadah (words which we have explained 
 at large elsewhere, 1 and which may most briefly be rendered 
 by " Law " and " Legend "), which we find in the Koran ; 2 
 but we think Islam neither more nor less than Judaism as 
 adapted to Arabia — plus the apostleship of Jesus and Mo- 
 hammed. Nay, we verily believe that a great deal of such 
 Christianity as has found its way into the Koran, has found 
 it through Jewish channels. 
 
 We shall speak of these things in due season. Meantime, 
 we would turn for a moment to certain medieval Jewish 
 opinions both on Christianity and Islam, which will probably 
 astonish our readers. They belong to very high authorities 
 of the Jud?co-Arabic Dispersion in Spain: — Maimuni, gene- 
 rally called Maimonides, and Jehuda Al-Hassan ben Halevi. 
 
 1 Sec page 17. 
 
 2 Several of these have been pointed 
 out from Maracci, Reland, Mill, Sale, 
 
 to Geiger (1833) — the facile princeps 
 on this field — Muir, Noldeke, Kod- 
 well, &c.
 
 ISLAM. 65 
 
 The former, at the close of his great " Digest of the Jewish 
 Law," fearlessly speaks of Christ and Mohammed as heralds 
 of the final Messianic times. In filling the world with the 
 message of the Messiah, with the words of. Scripture and its 
 precepts, they have, he says, caused these exalted notions 
 and sacred words to spread to the furthest ends of the earth. 
 The latter — sweet singer, as well as great philosopher — wrote 
 a book, in Arabic, called " Kusari," wherein a Jew, a Christian, 
 and a Mohammedan, are made to defend and to explain their 
 respective creeds before the King of the Chazars — the king 
 of the country now called the Crimea — who, in the tenth 
 century of our era, had, together with his whole people, em- 
 braced Judaism. The Jewish speaker compares the religion 
 founded by Moses to a seed-corn, which, apparently dissolved 
 into its elements, is lost to sight ; while in reality it assimi- 
 lates the elements around and throws off its own husk. And 
 in the glorious end, both it and the things around will grow 
 up together even as one tree, whose fruit is the Messianic- 
 time. The concise description of Islam which the author 
 puts into the mouth of the Mohammedan interlocutor is so 
 fair and correct that it might stand at the begiuning of a 
 religious Mohammedan compendium. 
 
 But in this they were but the exponents of the real feeling 
 of the Synagogue from the earliest times, on this matter. 
 For, startling as it may seem, what we are wont to consider 
 the emphatically modem idea of the " three Semitic creeds " 
 — being by their fundamental unity on the one hand, and 
 their varying supplementary dogmas on the other, apparently 
 intended to bring all humanity Avithin the pale of Mono- 
 theism — is found foreshadowed in those Talmudical oracles. 
 They who composed them were truly called the Wise, the 
 Disciples of the Wise. They did not prophesy ; they would 
 have shrunk with horror from a like notion ; but with a 
 heart full of poetry they often combined marvellous keen- 
 ness of philosophical insight. And thus while they develop 
 the minutest legal points with an incisive logical sharpness, 
 while they keep our imagination spell-bound by their gor- 
 geous lore, they at times amaze us with views apparently 
 
 F
 
 60 ISLAM. 
 
 wide apart from tlieir subject; but views so large, so en- 
 lightened, so " advanced," that we have to read again 
 and again to believe : — even as the age of the Renaissance 
 was amazed and startled when the long-buried song and 
 wisdom of the Antique were made to open their divine lips 
 anew. 
 
 Parallel with those transparent allegories of all mankind 
 being addressed on Sinai ; or those others of " God's name 
 being inscribed in seventy languages on Moses' wonder- 
 staff; " or of "Joshua engraving the Law in seventy stones 
 on the other side of the Jordan ; " there runs the clear and 
 distinct idea of certain apostolic Monotheistic nations or 
 phases. They are three in number. These three are our 
 three " Semitic creeds." 
 
 We shall, out of the many Variants that in more or less 
 poetical guise embody this thought, echoed and re-echoed by 
 the highest authorities of the Synagogue, and as often used 
 and mis-used in fierce mediaeval JuchTO-Moharnrnedan contro- 
 versy, select what we consider the very oldest. It is found 
 in the Si/re, a work, although of somewhat later redaction, 
 anterior to the Mishnah, and often quoted in the Talmud as 
 one of its own oldest sources. 
 
 A homiletic exposition of Numbers and Deuteronomy, it 
 lovingly tarries at the last chapter — Moses' parting blessing. 
 The Tanchuma introduces this chapter by the striking re- 
 mark that while through all other blessings recorded in the 
 Pentateuch — of Noah, of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob — there 
 always rings some discord, some one harsh note, whereby the 
 bliss foretold is concentrated upon some special heads to the 
 exclusion of others, the dying song of Moses is one unbroken 
 strain of harmony. Its golden blessings flow for all alike, 
 and there is none to stand aside, weeping. And the Si/re, 
 in a kind of paraphrase of the special verses themselves, 
 literally continues as follows : — " ' The Lord came from Sinai/ 
 that means : — the Law was given in Hebrew ; ' and rose up 
 from Se'ir unto them,' that means it was also given in Greek 
 (Rumi); 'and he shined forth from Mount Paran? that 
 means in Arabic." . . .
 
 ISLAM. 67 
 
 There is a fourth language added, " ' He came with the thou- 
 sands of Saints/ and this means Aramaic' " Even granting 
 the typical nature of the three geographical names alluded 
 to — and it is not to be denied that Sinai and Seir are con- 
 stantly used for Israel and Esau-Edom-Eome, while Faran 
 plainly stands for Arabia, whether or not it be the name of the 
 mountains round Mecca as contended — the connexion of the 
 " thousands of Saints " with Aram, does not seem quite clear 
 at first sight — unless it mean Ezra's puritans. What, however, 
 is quite clear by this time is this, that " Aramaic " is typical 
 of Judaism : that Judaism which has supplanted both He- 
 braism and-Israelitisin, and which, having passed through its 
 most vital reformation under Aryan, notably Zoroastrian 
 auspices, during the Exile, subsequently stood at the cradle 
 both of Christianity and Mohammedanism. Aramaic repre- 
 sents that phase during and since the Babylonish captivity 
 whose legitimate and final expression is the " Oral Law," the 
 Talmud: that Talmud, which with one hand — like those 
 Puritans — reared iron walls around the sacred precincts of 
 Faith and Nationality, and with the other laid out these 
 inmost precincts with flowery mazes, of exotic colours, of 
 bewildering fragrance — " a sweet-smelling savour unto the 
 Lord." 
 
 When the Talmud was completed (finally gathered in, we 
 mean — not composed), the Koran was begun. Post hoc — 
 propter hoc. We do not intend to convey the notion as if 
 the Talmudical authors had foretold the Koran. On the 
 contrary, had they known its nature they would scarcely 
 have bestowed upon it the term of "Revelation." But 
 here is the passage: a wondrous sign of their clear ap- 
 preciation of the elements of culture represented by the 
 nations and clans around them. Hellas-Rome and Arabia 
 appeared to them the fittest preparatory mediums or pre- 
 liminary stages of this great Sinaitic mission of Faith and 
 Culture. 
 
 Post hoe — propter hoc. The Hebrew, the Greek, the Ara- 
 maic phases of Monotheism, the Old Testament, the New 
 Testament, the Targum, and the Talmud, were each in their 
 
 f 2
 
 6*8 
 
 ISLAM. 
 
 sphere fulfilling their behests. The times were ripe for the 
 Arabic phase. 1 
 
 In the year 571, was born Mohammed — or he, who, to- 
 gether with his mission, appears with that significant name 
 of the " Praised," under which he was supposed to have been 
 foretold in the Old and New Testament. 2 It was but a few 
 years after the death of that Byzantine Louis XIV., Jnstinian, 
 who had aimed at creating one State, one Law, one Church 
 throughout the world ; who had laid the first interdict upon 
 the Talmud; who most significantly gathered building ma- 
 terials from all the famous " heathen " temples — of Baal i >f 
 Baalbeck and Pallas of Athens, of " Isis and Osiris " of Helio- 
 polis and the Great Diana of Ephesus, therewith to recon- 
 struct the Hagia Sophia at Constantinople — the same Hagia 
 Sophia wherein now the grave and learned doctors cease not 
 to expound the Koran. In those days Arabia expected her 
 own prophet. The Jews in Arabia are said to have watched 
 for his appearance. 
 
 Few religions have been founded in plain day like Islam, 
 which now counts its believers by more than a hundred mil- 
 lions, and which enlarges its domain from day to day, un- 
 aided. Most clearly and sharply does Mohammed stand out 
 
 1 [We must protest against the 
 construction put upon this passage by 
 some of our contemporaries. The 
 historical sequence of events is merely 
 described; it was not our object to 
 discuss tlic claims and authority of 
 Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism ; 
 and it is a complete misrepresentation 
 of our words to assert that we placed 
 the three religions upon an equal 
 footing. — Note by the Author to the 
 Second Edition.] 
 
 : There exist very grave doubts as 
 to Whether this really was the Pro- 
 phet's name. Originally called Ko- 
 than, he is held to have first adopted 
 the epithet of Mohammed, either to- 
 gether with his mission or, perhaps, 
 not even before the Flight. It is not 
 easy to fix upon the exact passages, 
 cither in the Old or New Testament, 
 to which the Prophet himself alludes, 
 as foretelling him by name : as Mo- 
 
 hammed in the Old, and as Ahmad, 
 another form of the same name, in the 
 New. Regarding the latter, probably 
 John's Paraclete (amended by some 
 into irepiKAvros), which in Arabic 
 might be Ahmad, is meant. As to 
 the Old Testament, the Vulgate — 
 that most faithful receptacle of Jew- 
 ish tradition, as transmitted to Jerome 
 by his Rabbis — will best help us. 
 There is no doubt that, with that root 
 hit until there is generally mixed up 
 some kind of Messianic notion in the 
 eyes of Targumists and Haggadists. 
 And when in Haggai ii. 8, we find the 
 word "Hemdah"=a precious thing, 
 rendered, against grammar and con- 
 text, by " Destderatue — omnium gen- 
 tium," we may be sure that the Syna- 
 gogue did look upon this passage as 
 Messianic, though there be no very 
 direct evidence extant.
 
 ISLAM. 69 
 
 against the horizon of history. Those who knew him, not for 
 hours, or days, or weeks, but from birth to death, almost 
 during his whole life, count not by units, or dozens, but by 
 thousands upon thousands, whose names and whose biogra- 
 phies have been collected ; and his witnesses were men in 
 the fulness and ripeness of age and wisdom, some his bitterest 
 enemies. No religious code extant bears so emphatically and 
 clearly the marks and traces of one mind, from beginning to 
 end, as the Koran, though, as to materials and contents, there 
 is, as we have hinted already, a passing strange tale to tell. 
 It will therefore behove us, in order that we may better un- 
 derstand how Mohammed made these materials entirely his 
 own, how he moulded and shaped, and added unto them, to 
 try and realise first the man himself and the vicissitudes that 
 influenced his mind — its workings and its stragglings, its 
 despairs and its triumphs. 
 
 This shall be done very briefly. And, though it seems 
 next to impossible to separate the man from his book, we 
 shall yet attempt to separate them. True, the more than 
 twenty years which its composition occupied, are embalmed in 
 it with all their strange changes of fortune, with their terrors 
 and visions, their curses and their prayers, their bulletins 
 and their field-orders. The Koran does indeed illustrate and 
 explain its author's life so well that hitherto every biographer 
 (and there have been many and great ones) has suggested, in 
 accordance witli his own views, a different arrangement of 
 that book. In its present shape a sheer chaos as regards 
 chronological or logical order of chapters and even verses, 
 it will lend itself admirably to all and any arrangement. 
 You may work it, as it were, backwards and forwards. Some- 
 thing is supposed to have happened at a certain time : here 
 is a verse looking like a vague allusion to it : therefore the 
 verse belongs to that period, and confirms the previously 
 doubtful fact. Here is a verse which alludes to some event 
 or other of which nothing is known, and the event is solemnly 
 registered, a fitting date is given to it, and the verse finds its 
 clironological place. But we have nothing to arrange, and 
 therefore, though it be less easy and less picturesque to
 
 70 ISLAM. 
 
 consider the author and the book as independently as may 
 be, we do so at Mohammed's express desire as it were, and 
 in bare justice to him. He wishes the Koran to be judged 
 by its own contents. " Hie Rhodus, hie salta," he seems to 
 cry. The Book is his sign, his miracle, his mission. His 
 own story is another matter. And without preconceived 
 opinions — either as panegyrist or as Advocatus Diaboli — 
 shall we try to tell it and then be unfettered in our story 
 of the Book. If we make use of the "Sunnah" for our 
 purpose no one will blame us. This Midrash of Moham- 
 medanism, as we should call those traditional records of the 
 Prophet's doings and sayings, both in the legendary and 
 juridical sense of the word, has, albeit in exalted tones and 
 colours often, told us much of his outer and inner life. Used 
 with the same patient care with which all documents are 
 used by the impartial historian, it yields precious infor- 
 mation. 
 
 We have reason to discard much of what has long been 
 repeated about Moharnnied's early life. All we know, or think 
 we know now for certain, is that he lost his father before his 
 birth, and his mother when he was six years of age. His 
 grandfather who had adopted him died two years later, and 
 his poor uncle Abu Talib then took charge of him. Though 
 belonging to a good enough family, the Koreish, though 
 sickly, subject to epilepsy, Mohammed had early to work for 
 his living. He tended the flocks — even as Moses, David, 
 and all prophets had done, he used to say. " Pick me out 
 the blackest of these berries," he cried once at Medina, when 
 prophet and king, he saw some people pass with berries of 
 the wild shrub Arak. " Pick me out the blackest, for they 
 are sweet — even such was I wont to gather when I tended the 
 flocks of Mecca at Ajyad." But by the Meccans tending of 
 flocks was considered a very low occupation indeed. In his 
 twenty-fourth year, a rich widow of Mecca, Chadija, about 
 thirty-eight years of age, and twice before married, engaged 
 his services. He accompanied her caravans on several 
 journeys, probably as a camel-driver. Of a sudden she 
 offered him her hand, and obtained the consent of her father
 
 ISLAM. 71 
 
 "by intoxicating him. She bore Mohammed two sons, one of 
 whom he called after a popular idol, and four daughters. 
 Both boys died early. 
 
 This is the whole story of Mohammed's outer life previous 
 to the assumption of his mission. The ever-repeated tale of 
 his having accidentally been chosen, in his thirty-fifth year, 
 as arbiter in a quarrel about the replacing of the Black Stone 
 in the Kaaba, is at least very questionable, as are his repeated 
 travels in Syria with his uncles, to which we shall return 
 anent a certain monk who appears in many aliases, and who 
 proves to be more or less a myth. 
 
 Mohammed's personal appearance, a matter of some im- 
 port, chiefly in a prophet, is almost feature by feature thus 
 portrayed by the best authenticated traditionists : — 
 
 He was of middle height, rather thin, but broad of 
 shoulders, wide of chest, strong of bone and muscle. His 
 head was massive, strongly developed. Dark hair — slightly 
 curled — flowed in a dense mass down almost to his shoulders. 
 Even in advanced age it was sprinkled by only about twenty 
 grey hairs — produced by the agonies of his " Revelations." 
 His face was oval-shaped, slightly tawny of colour. Fine, 
 long, arched eyebrows were divided by a vein which throbbed 
 visibly in moments of passion. Great black restless eyes 
 shone out from under long heavy eyelashes. His nose was 
 large, slightly aquiline. His teeth, upon which he bestowed 
 great care, were well set, dazzling white. A full beard 
 framed his manly face. His skin was clear and soft, his 
 complexion " red and white," his hands were as " silk and 
 satin " — even as those of a woman. His step was quick and 
 elastic, yet firm, and as that of one " who steps from a high 
 to a low place." In turning his face he would also turn his 
 full body. His whole gait and presence were dignified and 
 imposing. His countenance was mild and pensive. His 
 laugh was rarely more than a smile. " Oh, my little son ! " 
 reads one tradition, " hadst thou seen him thou wouldest 
 have said thou hadst seen a sun rising." " I," says another 
 witness, "saw him in a moonlight night, and sometimes I 
 looked at his beauty and sometimes I looked at the moon,
 
 72 ISLAM. 
 
 and his dress was striped with red, and he was brighter audi 
 more beautiful to me than the moon." 
 
 In his habits he was extremely simple, though he bestowed 
 great care on his person. His eating and drinking, his dress 
 and his furniture, retained, even when he had reached the 
 fulness of power, their almost primitive nature. He made a 
 point of giving away all " superfluities." The only luxuries he 
 indulged in Avere, besides arms, which he highly prized;, 
 certain yellow boots, a present from the Negus of Abyssinia. 
 Perfumes, however, he loved passionately, being most sensi- 
 tive of smell. Strong drinks he abhorred. 
 
 His constitution was extremely delicate. He was nervously 
 afraid of bodily pain, he would sob and roar under it. 
 Eminently unpractical in all common things of life, he was 
 gifted with mighty powers of imagination, elevation of mind, 
 delicacy and refinement of feeling. " He is more modest 
 than a virgin behind her curtain," it was said of him. He 
 was most indulgent to his inferiors, and would never allow 
 his awkward little page to be scolded, whatever he did. " Ten 
 years," said Anas, his servant, " was I about the prophet, and 
 he never said as much as "uff " to me." He was very affection- 
 ate towards his family. One of his boys died on his breast, in 
 the smoky house of the nurse, a blacksmith's wife. He was 
 very fond of children. He would stop them in the streets 
 and pat their little cheeks. He never struck any one in his 
 life. The worst expression he ever made use of in conver- 
 sation was, ''What has come to him? — may his forehead be 
 darkened with mud ! " When asked to curse some one, he 
 replied, "I have not been sent to curse, but to be a mercy to 
 mankind." " He visited the sick, followed any bier he met, 
 accepted the invitation of a slave to dinner, mended his own 
 clothes, milked his goats, and waited upon himself," relates 
 summarily another tradition. He never first withdrew his 
 hand out of another man's palm, and turned not before the 
 other had turned. His hand, we read elsewhere — and 
 traditions like these give a good index of what the Arabs 
 expected their prophet to be — was the most generous, Lis. 
 breast the most courageous, his tongue the most truthful ; he
 
 ISLAM. 73 
 
 was the most faithful protector of those he protected, the 
 sweetest and most agreeable in conversation ; those who saw 
 him were suddenly filled with reverence, those who came 
 near him loved him, they who described him would say, " I 
 have never seen his like either before or after." He was of 
 great taciturnity, but when he spoke it was with emphasis 
 and deliberation, and no one could ever forget what he said. 
 He was, however, very nervous and restless withal, often low- 
 spirited, downcast as to heart and eyes. Yet he would at 
 times suddenly break through those broodings, become gay, 
 talkative, jocular, chiefly among his own. He would then 
 delight in telling amusing little stories, fairy tales, and the 
 like. He would romp with the children and play with their 
 toys — as, after his first Avife's death, he was wont to play with 
 the dolls his new baby-wife had brought into his house. 
 
 The common cares of life had been taken from him by the 
 motherly hand of Chadija : but heavier cares seemed now to 
 darken his soul, to weigh down his whole being. As time 
 wore on, the gloom and misery of his heart became more and 
 more terrible. He neglected his household matters, and fled 
 all men. " Solitude became a passion to him," the traditions 
 record. He had now passed the meridian of his life. No 
 one seemed to heed the brooder, no one stretched out the 
 hand of sympathy to him. He had nothing in common with 
 the rest, and he was left to himself. 
 
 Much chronological discussion has arisen as to the date of 
 the event of which we are going to speak. So much, how- 
 ever, seems certain, that Mohammed was at least forty years 
 of age when he went, according to the custom of some of his 
 countrymen, to spend the Rajab, the month of universal 
 armistice among the ancient Arabs, on Mount Hira, an hour's 
 walk from Mecca. This mountain, now called Mount of 
 Light, consists of a huge barren rock, torn by cleft and 
 hollow ravine, standing out solitary in the full white glare of 
 the desert sun, shadowless, flowerless, without well or rill. 
 On this rock, in a small dark cave, Mohammed lived, alone, 
 and spent his days and his nights, according to unanimous 
 tradition, in " Tahannoth.''
 
 74 ISLAM. 
 
 The weary guesses that have been made from the days of 
 these very traditions to our own, as to the meaning* and 
 derivation of this word, cannot be told. It has been put 
 on the rack by lexicographers, grammarians, commentators, 
 translators, investigators, of all hues and ages, and, we are 
 sorry to add, with no satisfactory result. To the general 
 meaning the context gave some cue, but the etymology of 
 the word, and its technical signification, have remained a 
 mystery, notwithstanding many various readings of its single 
 letters suggested by sheer despair. One of the latest, and 
 greatest, investigators, Sprenger, numbers it as of one the 
 most " indigestible morsels " among the many strange and 
 obsolete words that occur in connexion with Mohammed and 
 the Koran. 
 
 We do not intend to do more than throw out suggestions 
 — though very carefully weighed — for we must, to our re- 
 gret, leave all our philological scaffoldings behind. Regard- 
 ing this most mysterious word, we have a notion that it 
 might be explained, like scores of other tough morsels in the 
 Koran, by the Jewish, Hebrew, or Aramaic parlance of the 
 period, as it is preserved most fortunately in the Talmud, 
 the Targum, the Midrash. The word Tahannoth need not 
 be emendated into Tahannof, or any other weird form, to 
 agree with its traditional meaning, because we think that it 
 is only the Hebrew word Tehinnoth, which occurs bodily in 
 the Bible, and means " Prayers, Supplications." The change 
 of vowels is exactly the same as that from the Hebrew Gehin- 
 nom (New Test. Gehenna) to the Koranic Jahannam. Among 
 the Jews the word became technical for a certain class of 
 devotional prayers, customary, together with fastings, through- 
 out the month preceding the New Year's Day. It is known 
 more generally as a term for private devotions throughout the 
 year, chiefly for pious women. — This, however, only by the 
 way. 
 
 To devotions and asceticism, then, Mohammed gave him- 
 self up in his wild solitude. And after a time there came to 
 him dreams " resplendent like the rosy dawn." When he 
 left his cave to walk about on his rocky fastness, the wild
 
 ISLAM. 75 
 
 lierbs that grew in the clefts would bend their heads, and the 
 stones scattered in his way would cry, " Salain ! Hail, 
 Prophet of God." And horrified, not daring to look about 
 him, he fled back into his cave. That same cave has now 
 become a station for the Holy Pilgrimage, and on it that 
 early predecessor of our Burckhardts and Burtons, " Hajj 
 Joseph Pitts of Exon," the runaway sailor boy, delivered 
 himself of the judgment that "he had been in the cave, 
 and observed that it was not at all beautified, at which he 
 admired." 
 
 Suddenly, in the middle of the night — the " blessed night 
 Al Kadar," as the Koran has it — " and who will make thee 
 understand what the night Al Kadar is ? That night Al 
 Kadar, which is better than a thousand months .... which 
 bringeth peace and blessings till the rosy dawn" — in the 
 middle of that night, Mohammed woke from his sleep, and 
 he heard a voice. Twice it called, urging, and twice he 
 struggled and waived its call. But he was pressed sore, " as 
 if a fearful weight had been laid upon him." He thought 
 his last hour had come. And for the third time the voice 
 called : — ■ 
 
 " Cry ! " 
 
 And he said, " What shall I cry ? " ' 
 
 Came the answer : " Cry — in the name of thy Lord ! " . . . 
 
 And these, according to wellnigh unanimous tradition, fol- 
 lowed by nearly every ancient and modern authority, are the 
 first words of the Koran. Our readers will find them in the 
 ninety-sixth chapter of .that Book, to which they have been 
 banished by the Redactors. 
 
 We hasten to add that when we said that the above sen- 
 tence would be found in the ninety-sixth chapter of the 
 Koran, we were not quite accurate. The word which Ave 
 have ventured to translate Cry they will find rendered in as 
 many different ways as there were translators, investigators, 
 commentators, old and new. They will find Recite, Preach, 
 Read, Proclaim, Call out, Read the Scriptures — namely of 
 the Jews and Christians — and a weary variety of other 
 meanings which certainly belong to the word, though the
 
 76 ISLAM. 
 
 greater part of them is of obviously later date and utterly 
 out of the question in this case. 
 
 Our reasons for deviating from these time-honoured ver- 
 sions were of various kinds. In the first place, the Arabic 
 root in question is identical with our own, and in this primi- 
 tive root lie hidden all other significations. "Cry" is one 
 of those very few onomatopoetic words still common to both 
 Semitic and Indo-European. Its significations are indeed 
 manifold; from the vague sound given forth by bird or tree, 
 as in Sanskrit, to our English usage of silent weeping ; from 
 the Hebrew " deep crying unto deep " to the technical 
 Aramaic " reading the Scriptures " — in contradistinction to 
 •• n »admg the Mishnah " — from the weird German Sclirei to 
 the Greek herald's solemn proclamation — it is always the 
 same fundamental root : biliteral or triliteral. 
 
 Secondly, because the principal words of this tradition are 
 startlingly identical — another fact not hitherto noticed, as far 
 as Ave are aware — with a certain passage in Isaiah : " The 
 Voice said Cry, and I said, What shall I cry ? " — a passage 
 in which no one has yet translated the leading verb by 
 Recite, Read, Head the Scriptures, though there was never a 
 doubt as to whether Isaiah knew the Scriptures and could 
 read, while Mohammed distinctly denied being a " Scholar." 
 
 And, thirdly, because from this root is also derived the 
 word Koran. Derived : for it was in the very special Jewish 
 sense of Mikra, Scripture, that Mohammed gave that name 
 to every single fragment of that book, until it became, even 
 as the word Mishnah, its collective and general name. 
 
 We now resume our recital of that first revelation and its 
 immediate consequences, as tradition has preserved it. It 
 is of moment. 
 
 ^^Yhen the voice had ceased to speak, telling how from 
 minutest beginnings man had been called into existence and 
 lifted up by understanding and knowledge of the Lord, who 
 is most beneficent, and who hj the pen had revealed that 
 which men did not know, Mohammed woke from his trance 
 and felt as if i: a book " had been written in his heart. A 
 great trembling came upon him so that his whole body
 
 ISLAM. 77 
 
 shook, and the perspiration ran down his body. He hastened 
 home to his wife and said, '' Oh, Chadija ! what has happened 
 to me ! " He lay down, and she watched by him. "When he 
 recovered from his paroxysm he said, " Oh, Chadija ! he, of 
 whom one would not have believed it (meaning himself), 
 has become either a soothsayer (Kahin 1 ) or one possessed 
 '(by Pjins) — mad." She replied, " God is my protection, O 
 Abu-'l-Kasim ! (a name of Mohammed derived from one of 
 his boys), He will surely not let such a thing happen unto 
 thee, for thou speakest the truth, dost not return evil for 
 evil, keepest faith, art of a good life, and kind to thy rela- 
 tions and friends. And neither art thou a talker abroad 
 In the bazaars. What lias befallen thee? Hast thou seen 
 aught terrible ?" Mohammed replied, " Yes." And he told 
 her what he had seen. Whereupon she answered and said, 
 "Rejoice, O dear husband, and be of good cheer. He, in 
 whose hands stands Chadija's life, is my witness that thou 
 wilt be the prophet of this people." Then she arose and 
 went to her cousin Waraka, who was old and blind, and 
 "knew the Scriptures of the Jews and Christians." When 
 she told him what she had heard, he cried out, " Koddus, 
 Koddus! — Holy, Holy! Verily this is the Namus which 
 came to Moses. He will be the prophet of his people. Tell 
 him this. Bid him be of brave heart." 
 
 We must here interpose for a moment. This Waraka has 
 given rise to much and angry discussion — chiefly as to his 
 " conversion." He was long supposed to have been first an 
 idolater, then a Jew, finally a Christian. It has been shown, 
 however, by recent investigations, that whatever he was at 
 first, he certainly lived and died a Jew. To our mind this 
 one sentence goes a long way towards settling the point. 
 Koddus— is simply the Arabicised Hebrew Kadosh (Holy). 
 And while we need not prove that a Christian would scarcely 
 have used this exclamation (any more than he would have 
 
 1 The Hebrew " Cohen," priest, in I ready interpreter of dreams, -who had, 
 a deteriorated sense like the German like Daniel, to find out both the 
 •" Pfaffe." In the time of Mohammed dreams and their solutions, 
 it meant a low fortune-teller, an ever-
 
 78 
 
 ISLAM. 
 
 spoken of the " Namus "), we are reminded of the story in 
 the Midrash of the man whose heart was sore within him 
 for that he could neither read the Scripture nor the Mishnah. 
 And one day when he stood in the synagogue, and the pre- 
 centor reached that part of the liturgy in which God's holy 
 name is sanctified, this man lifted up his voice aloud and 
 cried out with all his main: "Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh!" 
 (Holy ! Holy ! Holy !). And when they asked him what 
 made him cry out thus, he said, " I have not been deemed 
 worthy to read the Scriptures, or the Mishnah, and now the 
 moment has come when I may sanctify God, shall I not 
 lift up my voice aloud?" "It did not last a year, or two, 
 or three," the legend adds, " but it so fell out that this man 
 became a great and mighty general, and a founder of a 
 colony within the Roman empire." 
 
 As to the " Namus" it is a hermaphrodite in words. It is 
 Arabic, but also Greek. That it is Talmudical need we say 
 it ? It is in the first instance vofios, Law, that which " by 
 custom and common consent " has become so. In Talmudical 
 phraseology it stands for the Thorah or Revealed Law. In 
 Arabic it further means one who communicates a secret 
 message. And all these different significations were con- 
 veyed by Waraka to Mohammed. The messenger and the 
 message, both divine, had come together, even as Moses 
 had been instructed in the Law by a special angel — not, 
 as former commentators, to save Waraka's Christianity, used 
 to explain, because to Mohammed, as to Moses, a new Law 
 was given, while Christ came to confirm what had been 
 given before. 
 
 Not long after this the two men met in the street of 
 Mecca. And Waraka said, " I swear by him in whose hand 
 Waraka's life is, God has chosen thee to be the prophet of 
 this people. The greatest Namus has come to thee. They 
 will call thee a liar ; they will persecute thee, they will 
 banish thee, they will fight against thee. Oh that I could 
 live to those days ! I would fight for thee." And he kissed 
 him on his forehead. The Prophet went home, and the words
 
 ISLAM. 79' 
 
 lie had heard were a great comfort to hirn and diminished 
 his anxiety. 
 
 After this Mohammed, in awe and trembling, waited for 
 other visions and revelations. But none came ; and the old 
 horrible doubts and suspicions crept over his soul. He went 
 up to Mount Hira again — this time to commit suicide. But,. 
 as often as he approached the precipice, lo, he beheld Gabriel 
 at the end of the horizon whithersoever he turned, who 
 said to him, " I am Gabriel, and thou art Mohammed, the 
 Prophet of God." And he stood as entranced, unable to 
 move backwards or forwards, until anxious Chadija sent out 
 men to seek him. 
 
 We must interrupt the course of the story for a moment 
 respecting this " Voice," which is called in the Koran, Gabriel, 
 or the Holy Ghost. We have on a previous occasion spoken 
 of the strange metamorphoses of Angels and Demons, as they 
 migrated from India to Babylonia, and from Babylonia to 
 Judaea. 1 Their further migration to Mecca did not produce 
 much change, since the process of Semitising them and making 
 them subservient to Monotheism had been wrought already 
 by the Talmud. Yet this strange identification of Gabriel 
 with the Holy Ghost which we find here is a problem not 
 fully to be solved, either by the Talmud or the Zend Avesta. 
 
 The Holy Ghost, an expression of most common occur- 
 rence in the Haggadah, is thus summarily explained by the 
 Talmud — as an emphatic answer probably to the popular 
 tendency of taking transcendental terms in a concrete sense. 
 <£ With ten names," says the Talmud, " is the Holy Ghost 
 named in Scripture. They are — Parable, Allegory, Enigma, 
 Speech, Sentence, Light, Command, Vision, Prophecy." In 
 the Angelic Hierarchy of the Talmud it is Michael (Vohu- 
 mano), and not Gabriel, who takes first rank. He stands 
 to the right of the Throne, Gabriel to the left ; he represents 
 Grace ; Gabriel, stern Justice : and though they are both 
 entrusted Avith watching over God's people, it is yet Michael 
 
 1 See page 50.
 
 80 ISLAM. 
 
 who stands fortli to fight for them, who brings them good 
 tidings, and who, as heavenly High Priest, "offers up the 
 souls of the righteous upon God's Altar." Yet he is often 
 accompanied by Gabriel, who is, be it observed, particularly 
 active in the life of Abraham. It is he who saves Abraham 
 from the fiery furnace into which Nimrod had cast him ; in 
 the message of Isaac's birth he is one of the three ' men,' and 
 his place is to Michael's right hand. In all other respects, he 
 is the exact counterpart of the Persian Craosho, and his prin- 
 cipal office is that of revenging and punishing evil, while lie 
 acts as a merciful genius to the good and elect. Hence, pro- 
 bably, he became in later Persian mythology, as well as in 
 the Talmud, the Divine Messenger. He is thus replete with 
 all knowledge, and — alone of all angels — is versed in all 
 human tongues. Islam has made a few transparently " ten- 
 dencious " changes. Gabriel here stands to the right hand 
 of the Throne, and Michael to the left, i.e. the former 
 becomes the Angel of Mercy, and the latter that of Punish- 
 ment. Omar, it is said, once went into a Jewish Academy 
 and asked the Jews about Gabriel's office. He, they mock- 
 ingly answered, is our enemy ; he betrays all our secrets to 
 Mohammed, and he and Michael are always at war with 
 each other — an answer which, taken seriously by Omar, so 
 shocked him that he cried out, <; Why, you are more unbe- 
 lieving than the Himyarites !" But might this strange identi- 
 fication of Gabriel and the Holy Ghost possibly be accounted 
 for by the tact that the mystic office with regard to the 
 birth of Christ, ascribed to the Holy Ghost by the Church, 
 is ascribed in Islam to Gabriel also, who, as in the New 
 Testament, announces the message to Mary, and that thus 
 the two have become fully identified in the minds of the 
 traditionists ? 
 
 We have left Mohammed in the terror-stricken state of a 
 mind conscious of its mission, and vainly trying to struggle 
 against it. The grim lonely darkness within, the horrible 
 dread lest it all be but mockery and self-deception, or " the 
 Devil's prompting ; " the inability of uttering, save in a few 
 wild rhapsodic sounds, that message which is silently and
 
 ISLAM. 81 
 
 agonizingly growing into shape — and Death seems the only- 
 refuge and salvation — who shall describe it ? It was through 
 these phases of a soul struggling between Heaven and Hell 
 that Mohammed went in those days, and the thought of 
 suicide came temptingly near. But, lo ! Gabriel on the edge 
 of the horizon crying : I am Gabriel, and thou art Moham- 
 med, God's Messenger. . . . Fear not ! 
 
 It is not easy to say how long that state of doubt and 
 terror lasted. Tradition, wildly diverging here, is, of course, 
 of little use. Probably he was not quite free froni it to the 
 day of his death. But, by degrees, and as he no longer had 
 to carry that dread burden in his lonely heart, he gathered 
 strength. His confidence in himself and in his mission rose. 
 No Demoniac, no contemptible soothsayer, no possessed 
 madman he — the voice within urged. And at times, a 
 blissful exultation took the place of the former horror. His 
 heart throbs with grateful joy. " By the midday splendour, 
 and by the stilly night," he cries, " the Lord does not reject 
 him, and will not forsake him, and the future shall be better 
 than the past. Has he not found him an orphan and given 
 him a home, found him astray and guided him into the 
 straight path, found him so poor and made him so rich ? " 
 " Wherefore," he adds, " do not thou oppress the orphan, 
 neither repel thou him who asketh of thee — but declare 
 aloud the bounties of thy Lord !".... 
 
 And the revelations now came one after the other without 
 intermission during a space of more than twenty years — 
 revelations, the central , sun of which was the doctrine of 
 God's Unity, Monotheism, of which he, Mohammed, was the 
 bearer to his own people. 
 
 Yet these Revelations did not come in visions bright, tran- 
 scendent, exalted. They came ghastly, weird, most horrible. 
 After long solitary broodings, a something used to move 
 Mohammed, all of a sudden, with frightful vehemence. He 
 " roared like a camel," his eyes rolled and glowed like red 
 coals, and on the coldest day terrible perspirations would 
 break out all over his body. • "When the terror ceased, it 
 seemed to him as if he had heard bells ringing, " the sound 
 
 G
 
 82 ISLAM. 
 
 whereof seemed to rend him to pieces " — as if he had heard 
 the voice of a man — as if he had seen Gabriel — or as if words 
 had teen written in his heart. Such was the agony he en- 
 dured, that some of the verses revealed to him well-nigh 
 made his hair turn white. 
 
 Mohammed was epileptic, and vast ingenuity and medical 
 knowledge have been lavished upon this point, as explana- 
 tory of Mohammed's mission and success. We, for our own 
 part, do not think that epilepsy ever made a man appear a 
 prophet to himself, or even to the people of the East ; or, for 
 the matter of that, inspired him with the like heart-moving 
 words and glorious pictures. Quite the contrary. It was 
 taken as a sign of demons within — demons, " Devs," devils, 
 to whom all manner of diseases were ascribed throughout the 
 antique world, in Phoenicia, in Greece, in Rome, in Persia, 
 and among the lower classes of Judrea after the Babylonian 
 Exile. The Talmud, which denies a concrete Satan, or 
 rather resolves him rationally into "passion," "remorse," 
 and " death," — stages corresponding to his being " Seducer," 
 " Accuser," and " Angel of Death " — speaks of these demons 
 as hobgoblins, or special diseases, and inveighs in terms of 
 contempt against the " exorcisms " in vogue 1 in Judsea about 
 the period of the birth of Christianity. Those '•' possessed " 
 loved solitary places, chiefly cemeteries ; they tore their 
 garments, and were altogether beyond the pale. On the 
 special nature of the possessing demons, the "Shedim" of 
 the Talmud, the "Devils" of the New Testament, the Jin, 
 or Genii, of the Koran, as different from and yet alike to the 
 Devas, and as forming the intermediate beings between men 
 and angels, as in Plato (Sijmpos.), we may yet have to speak. 
 
 1 True, Simon ben Yochai, the I a devil from tlie Emperor's daughter 
 fabulous author of the 2k)har, to whose I at Borne. But then this devil had 
 rather badly kept shrine at Merom, a good-naturedly offered his services 
 few hours from Tiberias (where also himself, and the object of Simon's em- 
 Shammai and Hillel are believed to bass)', tlie rescinding of an oppressive 
 be buried), the Faithful of Palestine, decree, was considered so praiseworthy 
 and even of Persia and India, make i in the main that these authorities 
 their annual pilgrimage to this day, ( rather shut their eyes to the per- 
 did once, and apparently with tlie i formance. 
 approval of the Authorities, drive out '
 
 ISLAM. 83 
 
 That they were all " pure, hoi) 7 , everlasting angels from the 
 beginning," and only came to be degraded (as were the Devas 
 by " Zoroastrianism," and the gods of Hellas and Rome by 
 Christianity) into wicked angels in the course of religious 
 reformation or change, — is unquestionable, even if the Book 
 of Enoch did not state it expressly. They are " fallen 
 Angels " — fallen through pride, envy, lust. The two angels 
 Shamchazai (Asai) and Azael (Uziel) of the Targum, the 
 Midrash, and the Koran (Marat and Harut), are thrown from 
 heaven because of their desiring the daughters of man, even 
 as Sammael himself loses his most high estate, because he 
 seduces Adam and Eve. True, there is a peculiar something 
 supposed to inhere in epilepsy. The Greeks called it a 
 sacred disease. Bacchantic and chorybantic furor were God- 
 inspired stages. The Pythia uttered her oracles under the 
 most distressing signs. Symptoms of convulsion were even 
 needed as a sign of the divine mania or inspiration. But 
 Mohammed did not utter any of his sayings while the par- 
 oxysm lasted. Clearly, distinctly, most consciously, did he 
 dictate to his scribe what had come to him — for he could 
 not write, according to his own account. But it may well 
 be, and it speaks for Mohammed's thorough honesty, that 
 he himself believed, in the very first stages, to have been 
 " inspired " during his fits by Jin. According to Zoroastro- 
 talmudical notions, which had penetrated into Arabia, these 
 Jin listened " behind the curtain " of Heaven and learnt the 
 things of the future. These they were then believed to com- 
 municate to the soothsayers and diviners. But it was dan- 
 gerous eavesdropping enough. When the heavenly watchers 
 perceived these curious goblins, they hurled arrows of fire at 
 them : in which men saw falling stars. Mohammed soon, 
 however, rejected this notion of " demoniac " inspiration : 
 while from the Byzantines to Luther, and from Luther to 
 Muir, it was the devil, who prompted the prophet. Muir 
 has indeed instituted several minute comparisons between 
 Satan tempting Christ and Mohammed. Whereat Sprenger 
 somewhat irreverently observes, that since there be a Devil, 
 he must needs have something to do. 
 
 G 2
 
 84 ISLAM. 
 
 Tempted as we feel, before we proceed to describe the 
 mental and religious atmosphere around Mohammed when 
 he came to proclaim "the faith of Abraham," that first 
 bearer of the emphatically Semitic mission, to enlarge upon 
 that great question of the day, the mission of the Semitic 
 races in general, we must confine ourselves to one or two 
 points touching their religious development. A brilliant 
 French savant has of late, in somewhat rash generalisation, 
 asserted that Monotheism is a Semitic instinct. On which 
 another, one of the most profound scholars — since, alas ! 
 dead — observed that the assertion Avas perfectly correct, if 
 you exclude all the Semitic races save the Jews : and these, 
 it might be added, at a very late period indeed, notwith- 
 standing all the teachings of Moses and the Prophets, not 
 after a thousand judgments had come upon them, all the 
 horrors of internecine war, misery, captivity, and exile. The 
 Phoenicians were idolaters, the Assyrians were idolaters, the 
 Babylonians were idolaters, and the Arabs were idolaters. 
 And yet perhaps the truth lies, as usual, in the middle. If, 
 according to Schelling, who goes much further, a vague 
 Monotheism is the basis of all religions, there certainly does 
 seem to be an abstract idea of absolute power of rule and 
 dominion hidden in the universal Semitic name of the All- 
 Powerful Supreme God, to Avhom all the other natural 
 Powers, in their personified mythic guises, are subject, and 
 in whom they, as it were, are absorbed. Baal, El, Elohim, 
 Allah, Elion, denote not merely the Light, the bright 
 Heaven, as Zeus, Jupiter (subject in his turn to Fate, or that 
 " which had once been spoken "), but Might, Almightiness — 
 absolute, despotic, that created and destroyed, did and undid 
 according to its own tremendous Will alone, and by the side 
 of which nothing else existed : while Jehovah-Jahve seems 
 to point to the other stage and side of absolute Existence, 
 the Beiug from all times and for all times, the Ens, the First 
 Cause. And what is especially characteristic of the Shemites 
 is this, that while, as Jewish and Arabic tradition has it, the 
 sons of Japhet (Indo-Germans) are kings, and those of Ham 
 slaves, the sons of Shem are prophets. A thousand times
 
 ISLAM. 85 
 
 lulled into sweet dreams of beauty, they are aroused a thou- 
 sand times by the wild cry of the Prophet in their midst, 
 who points heavenwards, " Behold who hath created all 
 these !" But what is a Prophet ? — In the Hebrew term, 
 Nabi, which Islam adopted, there does not indeed appear to 
 inhere that foretelling faculty, with which from the time of 
 the Septuagint we are wont to connect it. For it is the 
 Septuagint which first translates it by irpo^TT)^, foreteller; 
 while others render it by " Inspired," or simply " Orator." 
 The manifold equivalents used in the Bible, such as watch- 
 man, seer, shepherd, messenger, one and all denote emphati- 
 cally the office of watching over the events, and of lifting 
 up the voice of warning, of reproving, of encouraging, before 
 all the people at the proper hour. Hence the Haggadah 
 has been called " the prophetess of the Exile," though no 
 Haggadist was ever considered "inspired." The Prophet 
 was above all things considered as the popular preacher and 
 teacher, gifted with religious enthusiasm, with an intense 
 love of his people, and with divine power of speech: — 
 whence alone the possibility of prophetic schools. And most 
 strikingly says the Midrash of Abraham that he was a 
 Prophet, a Nabi, but not an " Astrologer," one whose calling 
 it is not to forecast, but one who lifts men's minds heaven- 
 wards. In this sense — all transcendentalism apart — Mo- 
 hammed might well be called a prophet even by Jew r s and 
 Christians. 
 
 We can but guess at the state of Arab belief and worship 
 before Mohammed? For though the Arabs enter the world's 
 stage as long after the first joyous revelation of humanity in 
 Hellenism, as the Assyrians and Babylonians, not to speak 
 of the Phoenicians, had entered it before, they have left us 
 but little record of their doings in the period of " Ignorance " 
 — as with proud humility they called the time before Islam. 
 From what broken light is shed by a few forlorn rays, we 
 may conclude this, that they worshipped — to use that vague 
 word — the Hosts of Heaven, and that with this worship there 
 was combined a partial belief in resurrection among some 
 clans. Others, however, seem to have ascribed everything to
 
 8Q ISLAM. 
 
 " Nature," and to have denied a guiding Creator. We further 
 find traces of an adoration of fetishes : bodily representatives 
 of certain influences to be avoided, feared, and conciliated, or 
 to be loved, and gratefully acknowledged. The Sun and the 
 Moon, Jupiter and Venus, Canopus and Sirius and Mercury, 
 had their stony mementos, their temples, their priests, and, 
 be it well understood, the power of protecting those who fled 
 to their altars. Herodotus speaks of the Arabs as wor- 
 shipping only Dionysos (whom Strabo changes into Jupiter) 
 and Urania, " whom they call " Orotal (probably Nur- Allah 
 = God's light), and Alilat — a feminine form of Allah, the 
 Phoenician Queen of Heaven, Tanith-Astarte. Of a worship 
 of heroes in the form of statues there are vague traces, but 
 so vague and so mythical that they cannot be counted 
 historical material. Trees and stones are further mentioned 
 as objects of primitive Arab worship, and on this point Mai- 
 monides has given, as is his wont, clear and transparent 
 explanations, into which we cannot, however, enter. Among 
 the latter the famous Black Stone of the Kaaba, that pri- 
 meval temple ascribed to Abraham, stands foremost, nest 
 we know of a White Stone (Al Lat), at Taif, still seen by 
 Hamilton, and one or two more immovable tokens of some 
 great event, such as the Shemites were wont to erect, — 
 Jacob, among others, at Bethel (the general Phoenician term 
 for these stone erections) — mementos which the Pentateuch 
 emphatically protests against : " For I am Jehovah, your 
 God." Vaguer still are the records of the Oracle-Trees, one 
 of which stood near Mecca, while the other, dedicated to 
 Uzza, the Mighty Goddess, the Queen of Heaven, seems 
 to have spread all over the land, with its due complement of 
 priests and soothsayers, male and female. That there were 
 the usual accompaniment of Lares and Penates, more or less 
 coarse and bodily, such as always have been necessary for 
 the herd, need not be added. Thus, it is recorded of one 
 tribe that they worshipped a piece of dough, which, com- 
 pelled by hunger, they cheerfully ate up. Some, we said, 
 did not believe in the resurrection. Some did ; and there- 
 fore they tied a camel to a man's sepulchre, without pro-
 
 ISLAM. 87 
 
 viding it with any food. If it ran away, that man was ever- 
 lastingly damned — and, be it observed here, that the Jews 
 alone among the Shemites protested against everlasting 
 damnation — if not, its blackened bones would, on the Day 
 of Judgment, form a handy and honourable conveyance to 
 the abode of his bliss. The Phantoms of the Desert, the 
 Fata Morgana, Angels and Demons, and the rest of embodied 
 ideas or ideals, formed other objects of pious consideration, 
 but only as intermediators with the great Allah. Long 
 before Mohammed, the people were wont, in their distress, 
 to pray at their pilgrimages to him alone, in this wise : " At 
 thy service, Allah ! There is no Being like unto Thee, 
 and if there be one, it is Thou and not it that reigneth;" and 
 when asked what was the office of their idols, they would 
 answer that they were intermediators — much as Eoman 
 Catholics in the lower strata revere Saints and their em- 
 blems. Let it not be forgotten also that the perpetuation of 
 this pre-Islamic idolatry, if so we call it, was due to a great 
 extent to political reasons. The manifold Sanctuaries and 
 their incomes belonged to certain noble families and clans. 
 
 So much for the Heathenism. We have now to consider 
 the two other popularly assumed agents in that religious 
 phase to which Mohammed has given its name, and which 
 has changed the face of the world : Christianity and 
 Judaism. 
 
 It has long been the fashion to ascribe whatever was 
 " good " in Mohammedanism to Christianity. We fear this 
 theory is not compatible with the results of honest investi- 
 gation. For of Arabian Christianity, at the time of Mo- 
 hammed, the less said perhaps the better. By the side of it, 
 as seen in the Koran — and this book alone shows it to us 
 authentically as Mohammed saw it — even modern Amharic 
 Christianity, of which we possess such astounding accounts, 
 appears pure and exalted. And as, moreover, the monk 
 Bahira-Sergius-Georgius-Nestor, who is said to have in- 
 structed Mohammed, is a very intangible personage indeed, 
 if he be not, as there is reason to believe, actually a Jew ; 
 and as the several Syrian travels during which Mohammed
 
 S8 ISLAM. 
 
 is supposed to have been further inured into Christianity, 
 have to be taken cum grano, nothing remains but his contact 
 with a few freed Greek and Abyssinian slaves, who, having 
 lived all their life among Arabians, could hardly boast of 
 a very profound knowledge of the tenets and history of 
 Christianity. We shall, therefore, not be surprised to see 
 the Koran polemising against some such extraordinary 
 notions as that of Mary-Mary am, "the daughter of Imran, 
 the sister of Harnn," being not only the mother of God, but 
 forming a person in the Trinity ; or, on the other hand, to 
 meet with the extraordinary legends from the apocryphal 
 Gospel of the Infancy, and from the "Assumption" of Mary, 
 ascribed to John the Apostle himself. Or, again, to see it 
 adopt the heretical view of certain early Christian sects 
 that it was not Christ, but Judas, who was executed, and that 
 Christ had to allow the " hallucination " as a punishment for 
 having suffered people to call him God. But that funda- 
 mental tenet of Christianity, viz. the Sonship, Mohammed 
 fought against with unswerving consistency ; and never grew 
 tired of repeating, in the most emphatic terms which he, the 
 master of speech, could find, his abhorrence against that 
 notion, at which " the Heavens might tear open, and the 
 earth cleave asunder." There is a brief chapter in the Koran, 
 the " Confession of God's Unity," which is considered tanta- 
 mount to the third part of the whole Koran, though it only 
 consists of these words — "Say, God is one: the Everlasting 
 God. He begetteth not, and He is not begotten, and there is 
 none like unto Him." Still more distinctly is this notion 
 expressed in another place : — " The Christians say Christ is 
 the Son of God. May God resist them . . . how are they 
 infatuated ! " And, again : — " They are certainly infidels 
 who say God is One of Three." ..." Believe in God and 
 His Apostle, but speak not of a Trinity. There is but One 
 God. Far be it from Him that he should have a son." . . . 
 " Christ the Son of Mary is no more than an Apostle." . . . 
 " It is not tit for Allah that He should have a son. Praise 
 to him ! " (i.e. far be it from Him !) 
 
 Jesus, according to Mohammed, is only one of the six
 
 ISLAM. S9 
 
 Apostles, who are specially cliosen out of three hundred and 
 thirteen, to proclaim new dispensations, in confirmation of 
 previous ones. These are Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, 
 Jesus, and Mohammed. — But this point must come under 
 further consideration under the tenets of Islam. 
 
 We now turn to Judaism, which, as we have hinted before, 
 forms the kernel of Mohammedanism, both general and 
 special. Here merely the preliminary observation that when 
 we spoke of the Talmud as a source of Islam, we did not 
 imply that Mohammed knew it, or, for the matter of that, 
 had ever heard its very name ; but it seems as if he had 
 breathed from his childhood almost the air of contemporary 
 Judaism, such Judaism as is found by us crystallised in the 
 Talmud, the Targum, the Midrash. 
 
 Indeed, the geographical and ethnographical notices of 
 Arabia in Scripture are to so astounding a degree in accord- 
 ance with the very latest researches, that we cannot but 
 assume the connection between Palestine and Arabia to have 
 been close from the earliest periods. The Ishmaelites of the 
 Arabian midland are, in the earliest documents, carefully 
 distinguished from the Yoctanites and Kushites of Mahrah in 
 the south: not to speak of the minute information revealed 
 by the later documents. At what time Jews first went to 
 Arabia is a problem which we shall not endeavour to settle. 
 Of Abraham and Ishmael, and the halo of legends that 
 surrounds these national heroes, hereafter. But even reject- 
 ing, as we must do, the hallucinations of two most eminent 
 scholars regarding the immigration of an entire Simeonitic 
 regiment in the time of Saul, who having fought a battle 
 near Mecca — hence called Makkah Rabbah (Great Defeat) — 
 settled as Gorhoms or Gerini (Strangers), and so forth — we 
 cannot shut our eyes to the fact that Jews, " worshippers of 
 the invisible God of Abraham," existed, though in small 
 numbers, in Arabia, at a very primitive period indeed. 
 Bokht-Nasar, as Nebuchadnezzar is called in early Arabic 
 documents, caused many others to seek refuge in Arabia. 
 The Hasmoneans forced a whole tribe of Northern Arabia 
 to adopt Judaism ; a Jewish king of Arabs fights against
 
 00 
 
 ISLAM. 
 
 Pompey. The Talmud shows a rather unexpected familiarity 
 with Arab manners and customs, and — to indicate one 
 curious point — the prophet Elijah, who appears there as a 
 kind of immortal tutelary genius — gees about in the guise of 
 an Arab (the Khidhr of Mohammedan legend). The angels 
 that appear to Abraham " look like Arabs " — not to speak of 
 Job and his three friends, the Queen of Sheba, and other 
 like Arab reminiscences. Centuries before Mohammed, 
 Kheibar, five days from Medina, and Yemen, in South 
 Arabia, were in the hands of the Jews. Dim Nowas, the 
 last Jewish king of Yemen, falls by the hands of the Abys- 
 sinian Negus. The question for us remains, what phase of 
 faith these Jews represented. 
 
 It has been supposed that, though combined among them- 
 selves for purposes of war, they held little intercommuni- 
 cation with their brethren either in Palestine or even in 
 Arabia, and therefore were ignorant of the development of 
 " The Law " that went rolling on in Judaea and Babylonia. 
 The chief proof for this was found in the absence of Judaeo- 
 Arabic literature before Mohammed. To us, this circum- 
 stance affords absolutely no proof. None, at least, that 
 would not perhaps rather confirm our view to the exact 
 contrary. We know how literatures may be and have been 
 stamped out; or had the Phoenicians, the Chaldaeans, the 
 Etruscans, never any literature ? We happen to know the 
 contrary, though nothing, not to say worse than nothing, 
 because more or less corrupt reminiscences, has remained of 
 it all. And, further, we have distinct proof in the very 
 Koran that not only did they keep au courant with regard 
 to Haggadah — witness all the legends of Islam — but even 
 Halachah. Mohammed literally quotes a passage from the 
 Mishnah, 1 and, further, gives special injunctions taken from 
 the Gemara, such as the purification with sand in default of 
 water, the shortening of the prayer in the moment of danger, 
 
 1 Notably the j..Jge's admonition 
 to the witnesses, that he who wan- 
 tonly destroys one single human life 
 
 will be considered as guilty as if he 
 had destroyed a whole world.
 
 ISLAM. 91 
 
 &C 1 There is an academy, or Bethhamidrash, at Medina ; 
 and Akiba, when on his revolutionary mission, is consulted 
 by the Arab Jews about one of the most minute and intricate 
 points of the Oral Law. 
 
 In truth, these Jews stood not merely on the heights of 
 contemporary culture, but far above their Arab brethren. 
 They represented, in fact, the Culture of Arabia. They 
 could all read and write, whilst the Arabs had occasionally 
 to capture some foreign scholars and promise them their 
 liberty on condition that they should teach their boys the 
 elements of reading and writing. The Jews — nay, the 
 Jewesses, as Mohammed had to learn to his grief — were 
 specially gifted with the poetic vein, as we shall see further 
 on ; and poetry in Arabia was at the time of Mohammed the 
 one great accomplishment. There was a certain fair held 
 annually, where, as at the Olympic Games, the productions 
 of the last twelve months were read and received prizes. 
 The beautiful tale of the hanging up of the prize poems in 
 the Kaaba, whence they were called Moallakat, is unfor- 
 tunately a myth, since Moallakat does not betoken sus- 
 pended ones, but (pearls) loosely strung together. But, un- 
 doubtedly, to have made the best poem of the season was 
 a great distinction, not merely for the individual poet, but 
 for his entire clan. 
 
 These Jewish tribes, some of whom derived their genealogy 
 from priestly families (Al-Kahinani), lived scattered all over 
 Arabia, but chiefly in the south, in Yeman (Himyar), " the 
 dust of which was like unto gold, and where men never 
 died." They lived, as did the other Arabs, either the life of 
 roving Bedouins, or cultivated the land, or inhabited cities, 
 such as Yathrib, the later Medina or City, by way of emi- 
 nence — of the Prophet, to wit. Outwardly they had com- 
 pletely merged in the great Arabic family. Conversions of 
 entire clans to Judaism, intermarriages, and the immense 
 
 1 " Thy -will be done in Heaven ; liearest Prayer " — is the formula sug- 
 grant peace to them that fear Thee on gested by the Talmud for the hours 
 Earth ; and whatever pleaseth Thee, , of mental distraction or peril. . 
 do. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who I
 
 02 
 
 ISLAM. 
 
 family-likeness, so to speak, of the two descendants of Abra- 
 ham — for the derivation of the Arabs from Ishmael, what- 
 ever may be alleged to the contrary, seems unquestionably 
 an ante-Mohammedan notion — facilitated the levelling work 
 of Jewish cosmopolitanism. Acquainted, as we said, with 
 both Halachah and Haggadah, they seemed, under the 
 peculiar story-loving influence of their countrymen, to have 
 cultivated more particularly the latter with all its gorgeous 
 hues and colours. Valiant with the sword, which they not 
 rarely turned against their own kinsmen, they never omitted 
 the fulfilment of their greatest religious duty — the release of 
 their captives, though these might be their adversaries ; and 
 further, like their fathers, from of old, they kept the Sabbath 
 holy even in war, though the prohibition had been repealed. 
 They waited for the Messiah, and they turned their faces 
 towards Jerusalem. 1 They fasted, they prayed, and they 
 scattered around them the seeds of such high culture as was 
 contained in their literature. And Arabia called them the 
 People of the " Book ; " even as Hegel has called them the 
 People of the " Geist." These seeds, though some fell on 
 stones, and some on the desert sand, had borne fruit a 
 thousandfold. Of generally practical, nay vital, institutions 
 which they had introduced, long before Mohammed, into the 
 land of their adoption, may be mentioned the Calendar; and 
 the intercalary month was by the Arabs called, in grateful 
 acknowledgment Nassi (Prince), the title of the Babylonian 
 head of the Jewish Diaspora. The Kaaba and the Pilgrimage, 
 Yoctan and Ishmael, Zemzem and Hagar, received their 
 colouring from Jewish Arabs. They were altogether looked 
 up to with much reverence, and their superiority would also 
 
 1 The synagogues were generally 
 built in the form of a theatre, the 
 iwrtal due west, so that the worship- 
 per's face was turned to the east, even 
 to the Holy of Holies of the Temple 
 of Jerusalem, in pious allusion to the 
 words (1 Kings viii. 29), " That their 
 eyes may be open towards this house 
 night and day . . . that thou mayest 
 hearken to the prayers which thy ser- 
 
 vant shall make towards this place." 
 Daniel prayed towards Jerusalem 
 and "the tower of David, budded for 
 an armoury" of the Song of Songs, is 
 taken allegorieally as an allusion to 
 that enduring and mighty Holiness 
 that ever belonged to the spot, once 
 hallowed by the presence of the She- 
 chinah. And the early Church fol- 
 lowed also in this respect.
 
 ISLAM. 93 
 
 politically have stood them in very good stead, Avhen Moham- 
 med subsequently turned against them, had they known what 
 united action meant. 
 
 When we said that there were distinguished poets among 
 them, we meant poets not Jewish, but purely Arabic. Their 
 poems are all of intensely national Arabic type. Among 
 others Ave have fragments by Assamael (Samuel), "the faith- 
 ful," a great chief, who dwelt in a strong castle, and who, 
 rather than betray his friend's confidence, saw his boy cut in 
 twain before his eyes. What has survived of his songs" 
 breathes noble pride and loftiness of soul, tempered at times 
 by a strange sadness : joy of life and love of conviviality ; as 
 indeed one of his poems opens with the mournful question 
 whether the women would lament him after his death, and 
 how ? Both his son Garid, and his grandson Suba were poets ; 
 so were Arrabi, whose sons fought against Mohammed ; and 
 Aus, by whom we have a kind of characteristic, yet mild, 
 protest against his wife's change of creed. " We live," he 
 sings, " according to the Law (Thora) and Faith of Moses, 
 but Mohammed's Faith is also good. Each of us thinks 
 himself in the right path." Then there is Suraih, who 
 " would drink from the cup of those that are of noble heart, 
 even if there be twofold poison therein;" and about four or 
 five more, who sing of love and wine, the sword and faithful- 
 ness, hospitality and the horse. There were also Jewish 
 poetesses, whose poems, as we already mentioned, were " bit- 
 terer to Mohammed than arrows," and who did not escape his 
 vengeance. 
 
 We had to tarry somewhat on this out-of-the-way field of 
 the circumstances and position of Arabian Jews — not a little 
 of which would, but for Islam, never have been known. Of 
 their tenets and ceremonies, their legends and dogmas, as 
 transferred to Islam, we have to treat separately. And sucb 
 was Arabia as to difference of creeds when Mohammed arose. 
 We left him at the moment when he began to become aware 
 of his "Mission." But he was not without special pre- 
 decessors. These were the Hanifs, literally in Talmudical 
 parlance — " hypocrites." " Four shall not see God," says the
 
 94 ISLAM. 
 
 Talmud, " the scoffers, the Han ifs " (" who are to be exposed 
 at all hazards," while generally it is considered better " to be 
 thrown into a fiery furnace than bring any one to public 
 shame " x ), " the liars, the slanderers." These Hanifs form a 
 very curious and most important phase of Arabian faith 
 before Mohammed — a phase of Jewish Christianity or 
 Christian Judaism. They loved to style themselves also 
 " Abrahamitic Sabians," and Mohammed, at the outset, called 
 himself one* of them. They were, to all intents and purposes, 
 "heretics." They believed in One God. They had the 
 Law and the Gospel, and further certain " Rolls of Abraham 
 and Moses," called Ashnaat, to which Mohammed at first 
 appeals. This word Ashmaat, or Shamaata, has likewise 
 given rise to most hazardous conjectures. To us it appears 
 very simply the Talmudical Shemaata, which is identical 
 with Halachah or legal tradition. In Arabia it seems to 
 have assumed the signification of Midrash in general, chiefly 
 as regards its Haggadistic or legendary part. 2 These mys- 
 terious Rolls, about which endless discussions have arisen, 
 thus seem, to our mind, to have been neither more nor less 
 than certain collections of Midrash, beginning, as is its wont, 
 witli stern Halachah, ending, as is still more its wont, 
 with gorgeous dreams of fancy, woven round the sainted 
 heads of the Patriarchs, with transcendental allegories, — 
 " tales of angels, fairy legends, festal songs, and words of 
 wisdom." Nor does it much matter what were the original 
 names of these rolls or collections in question (there must 
 have been scores upon scores of them), since there is, as far 
 as we can gather their probable contents, but little in them 
 which has not survived in one form or the other in our extant 
 Midrash-books. 
 
 There were some very prominent men among this sect, if 
 sect it may be called. Foremost among them stands one 
 Omayya, a highly-gifted and most versatile poet, who never 
 
 1 See page 57. 
 
 2 We have noticed the same process 
 •with regard to the word Midrash it- 
 
 self in Palestine and Babylonia. See 
 page 13.
 
 ISLAM. 95 
 
 •would acknowledge Mohammed, and ceased not to write 
 satires upon hini ; more especially as it had been his inten- 
 tion to proclaim himself prophet. Besides him there are 
 recorded four special men (all relations of the Prophet, 
 Waraka among them), who, disgusted with the fetishism into 
 which their countrymen had sunk, once met at the Kaaba, 
 during the annual feast, and thus expressed their secret 
 opinion to each other. " Shall we encompass a stone which 
 neither heareth nor seeth, neither helpeth nor hurteth ? Let us 
 seek a better faith " they said. And they went abroad to seek 
 and to find the Hanifite creed — the " religion of Abraham." 
 
 This religion of Abraham, Mohammed came to re-establish, 
 Mohammed the Hanifite, who succeeded where the others 
 failed. He used the arguments, the doctrine, occasionally 
 the very words of these his predecessors, — though we have 
 here to be doubly on our guard against the possible colouring 
 of later Mohammedan tradition — chiefly of Zaid, who refrained 
 from eating blood and that which had been killed for idolatry 
 — two things pointing emphatically to Jewish teaching. 1 
 Zaid, it is reported, also abhorred the barbarous burying 
 alive of children, then customary among the Arabian savages, 
 and " worshipped the God of Abraham." Also, did he say, 
 " Lord, if I knew what form of worship Thou desirest, I 
 would adopt it. But I know it not."' And when his nephew 
 after his death asked the Prophet to pray for him, Mohammed 
 said, "Verily I will: he will form a Church of his own on 
 the Day of Judgment." Nay more, Zaid had actually taught 
 .at Mecca, and Mohammed openly declared himself his pupil. 
 
 We shall return to this " Keligion of Abraham," which is 
 the clue to Islam — and the mystery of which the Midrash 
 alone solves satisfactorily. At this stage it behoves us to 
 follow out the vicissitudes of Mohammed's career as briefly 
 as we may : for without these we could never fully compre- 
 hend that religion, whereof he is the corner-stone and the 
 pinnacle. 
 
 And first as to his early miracles, which nearly proved his 
 
 1 Foremost among the seven fundamental " Laws of the Sons of Noah.
 
 06 
 
 ISLAM. 
 
 ruin. The Jews required a sign, says the New Testament. 
 The desire to see the Prophet, the chosen and gifted person, 
 perform things apparently contrary to what is called nature — 
 sights and sounds to wonder at, things by which to prove his 
 intimate communication with and the command over the 
 more or less personified powers of the Cosmos, of which 
 ancient and mediaeval times had so vague a notion — is very 
 easily understood ; and both the Old and New Testament 
 are replete with extraordinary manifestations. The Talmud, 
 while representing, to a certain extent, what is called the 
 "advanced" opinion of the time, certainly contains views 
 somewhat different from the popular one. " Esther's Miracle," 
 it says, " was the last — the end of all miracles." And she is 
 called, in allusion to the well-known Psalm-heading, " Hind of 
 the Dawn " — ' 'because with her it first became Light." And 
 since there is nothing in the whole story of Esther which 
 resembles in the faintest degree a " supernatural " act ; and 
 since, moreover, the name of God does not even appear in 
 the book from beginning to end, this Talmudic parlance of 
 " miracles " is very like the modern use of the word " pro- 
 phet," of which it was remarked the other day that " many 
 living writers, having first stripped the word of its ancient 
 meaning, bestow it freely upon anybody." Furthermore the 
 Mishnah had distinctly declared that miracles were " created " 
 from the very beginning, in the gloaming of the sixth day. 
 "God," says the Talmud, still more explicitly "made it a 
 condition upon the sea, when He created it, to open itself 
 before the Israelites; the fire to leave the three martyrs 
 unscathed ; the heavens to open to the voice of Hezekiah," 
 &C. 1 No less clearly is the meaning of the Masters further 
 expressed in such sentences as these : " The healing of a sick 
 person often is a greater miracle than that which happened 
 to the men in the pit. Those that have been saved from 
 flagrant sin may consider that a miracle has happened to 
 them. Do not reckon upon a miracle — they do not happen 
 every day. Those to whom a miracle happens often know 
 
 1 See page 51.
 
 ISLAM. 97 
 
 it not themselves." &c. &c. But the old craving for wonders 
 was either still strong among them, or they wished to vex 
 Mohammed's soul — as they did in a thousand bitter little 
 ways — when they found themselves disappointed in him, and 
 so incited people to ask him for some miraculous performance. 
 He is asked, he complains, to cause wells and rivers to gush 
 forth, to bring down the heaven in pieces, to remove moun- 
 tains, to have a house of gold, to ascend to heaven by a ladder, 
 to cause the dead to speak, and to make Allah and his Angels 
 testify to him- — and he indignantly bursts out, " My Lord be 
 praised ! Am I more than a man sent as an apostle ? . . . 
 Angels do not commonly walk the earth, or God would have 
 despatched an angel to preach His truth to you;" and, he 
 says, when they do see a sign — even the moon splitting — 
 these unbelievers but turn aside, saying : " This is a well- 
 devised trick, a sleight of hand." 
 
 How well he had entered into the meaning of those Tal- 
 mudical notions on miracles — "Esther's being the last" — 
 and how positively he spoke upon that point, though in vain, 
 is best shown by his protest that " the miracles of all pro- 
 phets were confined to their own times. My miracle is the 
 Koran which shall remain for ever, and I am hopeful of 
 having more followers than any of the other prophets." 
 " Former prophets," he also used to say (and this is one of 
 the most momentous dicta) " were sent to their own sects. I 
 was sent to all. I have been sent for one thing only : to 
 make straight the crooked paths, to unite the strayed tribes, 
 and to teach that ' There is no God but God by whom the 
 eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf shall be opened, 
 and the hearts of those who know nothing.' " And over and 
 over again he points to those much greater signs " in Heaven 
 and on Earth" than any wondrous manifestation that had 
 ever been wrought by prophets — the sun, and the moon, and 
 the stars, the day and the night, the structure of men's 
 bodies, the mountains which steady the earth, the water that 
 comes from on high to slake the thirst of man, and cattle, 
 and plant, and tree : even the olive-tree, and the palm-tree, 
 and the vine — and he speaks to these desert folk of the sea 
 
 H
 
 98 ISLAM. 
 
 upon which walk the great ships. Are not all these things 
 made for man's use and service, even while they serve Allah ? 
 ..." I never said that Allah's treasures are in my hands, 
 that I knew the hidden things, or that I was an Angel. . . . 
 I, who cannot even help or trust myself, unless Allah willeth. 
 "Will ye not reflect a little?" .... Did they perceive the 
 flashes of lightning and the thunderous rolls? Allah would 
 show them His miracles in good time — even the yawning 
 mouth of Hell. Then they would indeed believe, even as 
 those people of the Cities of the Plain had believed, when it 
 was too late. Had their caravans passed the Dead Sea — 
 even Sodom and Gomorrha ? Did they know how Thamud 
 and Ad were destroyed by a terrible cry from Heaven, or 
 what had become of Pharaoh ? " These are the signs of 
 Allah. . . . He giveth Life, and He giveth Death, and unto 
 Him ye must return." . . . And to leave no doubt as to 
 what his own signs and wonders really consist of, the single 
 verses of the Koran are called Ayat = Hebr. Ot: — letter, sign, 
 wonder. 
 
 But all these protests availed nought. Miracles there must 
 be, and miracles there were. Three — and that is all — are 
 hinted at in the Koran. First, Mohammed's seeing Gabriel 
 " in the open horizon," when despair drove him to attempt 
 self-destruction : " One mighty in power, endued with under- 
 standing," revealed himself to him, then "on the highest 
 part of the horizon, at two bows' length." And again he 
 appears to him under a certain tree, "the Tree of the Limit" 
 — a lotos-tree : covered with myriads of angels, near the 
 Garden of Repose. This second vision, however, is probably 
 connected with the Miraj, or Mohammed's Night-journey. 
 The Jews had told the Arabians that no prophet ever arose 
 out of the Holy Land, and that Moses had gone up to 
 Heaven. What they did not tell them probably was that 
 other significant saying, that, since the destruction of Jeru- 
 salem, the gift of prophecy had fallen to fools and babes — a 
 dictum we have often enough felt inclined to quote of our 
 own days. And further, that the Talmud states, as expressly 
 as can be, that " Moses never went up to Heaven," — even as
 
 ISLAM. 99 
 
 it is written, "The Heavens are Jehovah's, and the Earth 
 hath He given to the children of man." l 
 
 It was therefore absolutely necessary that the Prophet 
 should have been in the Holy Land, nay, in Jerusalem. And 
 the Miraj happened, the transfiguration, the ascension, the 
 real consummation of Mohammed's mission, and the centre 
 of Islamic transcendental legend and creed. A whole volume 
 of traditions exists on this one single point. 
 
 " ' Praise be irnto Him,' says the Koran, ' who transported His servant 
 by night from the temple Al Haram (Mecca) to the remotest temple (of 
 Jerusalem), the circuit of which we have blessed, that we might show Him 
 some of our signs. Verily He, that heareth, that seeth ! '" . . . 
 
 And in verse sixty-two of that same chapter, this journey is 
 emphatically declared to be a " Vision " — " a dream " — " a 
 trial for men." 
 
 And these are its brief outlines, though Mohammed's own 
 -account was probably still more briefly and soberly conceived 
 as compared with the worlds of golden dreams in which the 
 later legend revels. 2 
 
 In the middle of the night Gabriel appeared to Moham- 
 med, and told him that the Lord had intended to bestow 
 honour upon him such as He had not bestowed upon any born 
 being yet, such as had never come into any man's heart. 
 He arose, and they went to the Kaaba, which they encom- 
 passed seven times. Gabriel then took out Mohammed's 
 heart, washed it in the well Zemzem, filled it with faith and 
 knowledge, and put it back in its place. He was then clothed 
 in a robe of light, and was covered with a turban of light, 
 in which, in thousandfold rays of light gleamed the words, 
 " Mohammed is God's Prophet ; Mohammed is God's Friend." 
 Then, surrounded by myriads of angels, he bestrode the 
 
 1 See page 54. I the Mohammedan legend of that fifth 
 
 - We may have occasion to trace Heaven of the Midrash " Gan Eden," 
 •some of the gorgeous features of this | which is reserved for the souls of 
 Vision in the latter Haggadah, when noble women — Pharaoh's daughter, 
 we speak of Mohammed's Heaven and who so tenderly took pity on the child 
 Hell. Exceedingly characteristic are Moses, occupying the first place in 
 the differences on some points : among j the first circle, 
 other (things, the entire omission in 
 
 H 2
 
 100 ISLAM. 
 
 Borah — which only means Lightning — who had the face of 
 a man ; his red chest was as a ruby, and his back like a 
 white pearl. His wings reached from the eastern point of the 
 horizon to the western, and at every step he went as far as 
 eye could see. Thrice Mohammed prayed while he flew : at 
 Medina, at Madyan, at Bethlehem. Sweet voices were call- 
 ing — to the left, to the right, before him, behind him : 
 beautiful women flitted around : he heeded nought. And 
 the angel told him that had he listened to the first voice, his 
 followers would have become Jews ; to the second, Christians \ 
 to the third, they would have given up Paradise for the plea- 
 sures of this world. At Jerusalem he entered, greeted by 
 new hosts of angels, the Temple (and the ring by which the 
 Borak was fastened has no doubt been seen by many of our 
 readers near the " Dome of the Rock ") ; and here all the 
 prophets, Christ among them, were assembled ; and very 
 striking are the likenesses given of them. Abraham resem- 
 bled Mohammed most of all. 
 
 Prayers were said, and Mohammed acted as Priest Pre- 
 centor. Most of the prophets then held a brief discourse in 
 praise of God, and descriptive of their own individual mis- 
 sion on earth. Mohammed, having spoken last, ascended 
 Jacob's ladder, standing upon the Rock, the same which 
 forms, according to the Midrash, the foundation stone of the 
 earth. And a very strange-looking rock it is, rising a few 
 feet above the marble around, scarcely touched with the 
 chisel, and at its south-western comer there is seen the " foot- 
 print of the Prophet," and next to it the "handprint of 
 Gabriel," who held down the rock as it tried to rise heaven- 
 wards with God's Messenger. The ladder on which Moham- 
 med mounted into the regions of light is the same which 
 Jacob saw in his dream : it reaches from Heaven to Earth, 
 and on it the souls of the departed return to God. It is 
 made of ruby and emerald, of gold and silver, and of precious 
 stones. 
 
 Having passed the angel who held the seven earths and 
 the seven heavenly spheres, and the blue abyss in which 
 float all ideal prototypes of things sublunary, he and Gabriel
 
 ISLAM. 101 
 
 arrived at the Gates of the first Heaven of the World, where 
 myriads of new angels held watch. Both he and Gabriel 
 entered and found other myriads praising God in the postures 
 of Muslim prayer. On a magnificent throne sat Adam, 
 dressed in light, the human souls arrayed by his sides — to 
 his right the good souls, to his left the wicked ones. Fur- 
 ther on were Paradise and Hell. Punishments were wrought 
 here according to earthly deeds. The miserly souls were 
 naked, and hungry, and thirsty ; thieves and swindlers sat at 
 tables filled with gorgeous things, of which they were not 
 allowed to participate ; and scoffers and slanderers carried 
 heavy spiked logs of wood that tore their flesh, even as they 
 had wounded the hearts of their fellow-men. Thus they 
 passed heaven after heaven. In the second they found Christ 
 and John the Baptist; in the third, Joseph and David; in 
 the fourth, Enoch ; in the fifth, Aaron ; in the sixth, Moses, 
 who wept because Mohammed was to be more exalted than 
 he had been. In the highest heaven they found Abraham. 
 Above the seventh heaven they came to a tree of vast 
 leaves and fruits. In it is Gabriel's dwelling-place, on one 
 branch of untold expanse ; in another, myriads of angels are 
 reading the Pentateuch ; in another, other myriads of angels 
 read the Gospel ; yet in another, they sing the Psalms ; and 
 in another, they chant the Koran, from eternity to eternity. 
 Four rivers flow forth from this region, one of which is the 
 river of Mercy. There is also a House of Prayer there, right 
 above the Kaaba. 1 Near it a tank of light, from which, 
 when Gabriel's light approaches it, seventy-thousand angels 
 spring into existence — which will remind our readers of the 
 river of fire that rolls its flames under the Divine throne, 
 and out of which rise ever new myriads of angels, who praise 
 God and sink back into nought.'- They approach the temple, 
 singing praises unto God ; and each time, when their voices 
 resound, a new angel is born. " Not a drop of water is in 
 
 1 In accordance with the Hagga- | Xcw Testament, 
 distic notion of the "Jerusalem above," ' Ste page 50. 
 and the " heavenly Jerusalem " of the [
 
 102 
 
 ISLAM. 
 
 the sea, not a leaf on a tree, not a span of space in the heavens 
 that is not guarded by an angel." And to this day all these 
 gorgeous transcendentalisms and day-dreams survive bodily 
 in certain Jewish mystic liturgical poems (Piut), into which 
 the golden rivers of the Haggadah have been turned by 
 Poets or " Paitanas " at an early period. 1 
 
 A space further, a little space, after the Tree of the Limit,. 
 Mohammed found himself of a sudden alone. Neither Ga- 
 briel nor Borak dared go beyond it ; and he heard a voice 
 calling "Approach." And he passed on, and curtain after 
 curtain, and veil after veil was drawn up before him and fell 
 behind him. When the last curtain rose, he stood within 
 two bow-shots from the Throne ; and here — says the Koran — 
 " he saw the greatest of the signs of his Lord." No pen dared 
 to say more. " There was a great stillness, and nothing was 
 heard except the silent sound of the reed, wherewith the 
 decrees of God are inscribed upon the tablets of Fate." . . . 
 
 It would indeed be a labour of love, and not Avithout its re- 
 ward, to follow this Miraj-Saga through all its stages, down 
 to the Persian and Turkish cycles. But it is not our task. 
 All we have to add here is that Mohammed is not to be 
 made responsible for some of his enthusiastic admirers when 
 they transformed this Vision — a vision as grand as any in the 
 whole Divine Comedy (which indeed has unconsciously bor~ 
 rowed some of its richest plumage from it), but which Mo- 
 hammed, until he was sick of it, insisted on calling a Dream 
 — into insipidity and drivel. 
 
 One feature more deserves mention. When Zaid asked 
 the Prophet after his little daughter who had died, he 
 answered that she was in Paradise and happy. And Zaid 
 wept bitterly. 
 
 Eemains, as of traditional miracles, the last one of the two 
 Angels who took out Mohammed's heart when he was a boy r 
 purified it in snow, then weighed it, and found it weightier 
 than all the thousands they put into the other scale : — a 
 
 1 In Western Europe this part of the Jewish Liturgy, as too mystical 
 for the weaker brethren, has now mostly been abrogated.
 
 ISLAM. 103 
 
 parable equally transparent, and hardly a " miracle " in the 
 conventional sense of the word. 
 
 Only one command was given to Mohammed on that oc- 
 casion of the Ascension : — that his faithful should pray fifty 
 times daily. And when he returned to where Moses waited 
 for him, and told him this, Moses made him return to pray 
 God to reduce the number. And it was made forty. " This is 
 still too much," Moses said; "I know that the faithful will 
 not be able to do even thus much." And again and again was 
 the number reduced till it came to five, and Mohammed 
 no longer dared return to God, though Moses urged him 
 to do so. 
 
 Very strikingly indeed does the Haggadah manifest her con- 
 stant presence, not merely throughout this whole Vision, but 
 even in such minute features as this last, of God's instructing 
 Mohammed about prayer. 1 For when the Pentateuch re- 
 cords that extraordinary manifestation of God to Moses on the 
 rock, where the glory of the Lord passeth by and proclaims : 
 " Jehovah, Jehovah, God, merciful and gracious, long suffer- 
 ing, and abundant of goodness and truth, and keeping mercy 
 for thousands, forgiving iniquity, and transgression and sin " 
 . . . the Talmud first of all introduces this passage, as is its 
 wont in the like anthropomorphistic passages, with the awe- 
 stricken, half-trembling words that, If Holy Writ had not 
 said this, no man would dare to speak of a like manifestation ; 
 and, next, proceeds to explain that " God showed Moses how 
 that men should pray." — " Let them invoke my Mercy and 
 my Long-suffering. I will forgive them. Jehovah — twice 
 repeated — means, It is Jehovah, even I, before man sinneth, 
 and I, the selfsame Jehovah, after he has sinned and re- 
 pented." 
 
 It is time that we should now return, after these many in- 
 dispensable little monographs, to the founder of Islam him- 
 self, as a historical personage. Ere we proceed to his book 
 and faith, we must sum up the events that led first to his 
 Flight, that event with which not only he, but Arabia, enters 
 
 1 For the shortening of it see above, p. 91, note.
 
 104 
 
 ISLAM. 
 
 history, an event fraught with intense importance for all 
 mankind. 
 
 When Mohammed had become clear as to his mission 
 he sought converts. And his first convert was his faithful 
 motherly Chadija ; his second, the freed slave Zaid, probably 
 a Christian, whom he adopted ; and his third, his small 
 cousin Ali, ten years of age. Chadija, his good angel, Tra- 
 dition reports, 
 
 " believed in Mohammed and believed in the truth of the Revelation, and 
 fortified him in his aims. She was the first who believed in God, in His 
 messenger, and in the Revelation. Thereby God had sent him comfort, 
 for as often as he heard aught disagreeable, contradictory, or how he was 
 shown to be a liar, she was sad about it. God comforted him through her 
 when he returned to her, in rousing him up again and making his burden 
 more light to him, assuring him of her own faith in him, and representing 
 to him the futility of men's babble." 
 
 And, in truth, when she died, not merely he but Islam lost 
 much of their fervour, much of their purity. He would not 
 be comforted, though he married many wives after her ; and 
 the handsomest and youngest of his wives would never cease 
 being jealous of that " dead, toothless old woman." Abu 
 Bakr, a wealthy merchant, energetic, prudent, and honest, 
 joined at once. He had probably been a fellow-disciple of 
 Mohammed at the feet of Zaid the Skeptic and was his con- 
 fidant and bosom friend throughout his life — the only one 
 who unhesitatingly joined, " who tarried not, neither was he 
 perplexed," Mohammed said of him. It was he who stood at 
 the head of the twelve chosen Apostles who subsequently 
 rallied round the Prophet, among whom we find Hamza, the 
 Lion of God, Othman, Omar, and the rest, men of energy, 
 talent and wealth, and long before adverse to Paganism. 
 Those twelve were his principal advisers while he lived, and 
 after his death they founded an empire greater than that of 
 Alexander of Borne. As to Abu Bakr, he was but two years 
 younger than the Prophet, not a man of genius, but of calm, 
 clear, impartial judgment, and yet of so tender and sympa- 
 thetic a heart that he used to be called " the Sighing." He 
 was not only one of the most popular men, but also rich and
 
 ISLAM. 105 
 
 generous, and thus his influence cannot well be overrated. 
 It is his adherence to Mohammed throughout, which, even by 
 those who most depreciate the Prophet, is taken as one of 
 the highest guarantees of the latter's sincerity. Nay, he is 
 said to have done more for Islam than Mohammed himself — 
 not to mention that, with his extensive knowledge of gene- 
 alogy, one of the most important sciences of the period, he 
 was able at the Prophet's desire, to supply Hassan, the poet 
 of the Faith, with matter for satires against the inimical 
 Koreish. 
 
 Most of Mohammed's relations seemed to have treated his 
 teachings with scorn. " There he goes," they used to say ; 
 " he is going to speak to the world about the Heavens now." 
 Abu Lahab, in open family council, called him a fool, 
 instantly upon which followed that characteristic Surah, 
 ■"Perish shall the hands of Abu Lahab. May he perish. . . . 
 And his wife shall carry fuel for his hell fire." The other 
 Meccans treated the whole story of his mission, his revela- 
 tions, and dreams, with something like pitying contempt, as 
 long as he kept to generalities, though the number of uninflu- 
 ential adherents grew apace. But when he spoke of their 
 gods, which they naively enough would call Thagut (Error), 
 the technical Jewish word for Idols, 1 as Idols, they waxed 
 wroth, and combined against him, until the stir both he and 
 they made, spread more and more rapidly and dangerously, 
 and with it rose his own courage. He felt committed. All 
 hesitations, and doubts, and fears, and reconciliations, he 
 cast behind him now. He openly set the proud Meccaus at 
 defiance. He cursed those who reviled him with burninjr 
 curses. He cursed their fathers in their graves; nay, his 
 own father would undergo eternal punishment in hell, for 
 that he had been an idolater. " There is no God but Allah ! " 
 He cried it aloud, day and night, and the echoes became more 
 and more frequent. 
 
 His life was in jeopardy now, and his uncle Abu Talib, 
 under whose protection he had fallen when a youth, stood 
 
 1 See Targums, page 319, post.
 
 106 ISLAM. 
 
 forth against the whole clan. He would protect him if they 
 all combined against him. Did he believe in his Mission ? 
 Not in the least. He remained steadfast in his own creed or 
 skepticism to the day of his death. But he was an Arab, a 
 Sheinite. He had adopted him, and promised to protect 
 him; and nothing, absolutely nothing, could cause him to 
 break that holiest of engagements. He received the depu- 
 tations of his kinsfolk, listened to their speeches, " how that 
 Mohammed blasphemed their gods, called the living fools 
 and the dead denizens of hell fire, that he was mad, brought 
 disgrace upon their family and the Avhole clan, that he ought 
 to be extinguished somehow — anyhow ; " and he shook his 
 head, saying nothing, or next to nothing. Again they re- 
 turned and again, and, at last, demanded that the Possessed 
 3 Tan should be given up to them to be dealt with according- 
 to their judgment. If not — " We are determined no longer 
 to bear his blasphemy towards our gods, nor his insults 
 towards ourselves. If thou givest him protection, we will 
 fight both him and thee, until one of us shall have been 
 extinguished." 
 
 Abu Talib sent for Mohammed and tokThini what had 
 happened, representing to him the position of affairs, and 
 spoke to him about the danger he had brought upon their 
 good old tribe. And very characteristic, not merely for the 
 dramatis persona?, but for Arab feeling, is the further story 
 of the interview. Mohammed, though fully believing now 
 that even bis uncle was about to abandon him to the mercies 
 of his kinsfolk, replied — " By Allah, uncle, if they put the 
 sun to my right hand, and the moon to my left, I will not 
 give up the course which I am pursuing until Allah gives 
 me success or I perish." And the tears starting to his eyes, 
 he turned to depart. Then Abu Talib cried out aloud, " Son 
 of my brother, come back ! " And he returned. And Abu 
 Talib said : " Depart in peace, my nephew ! Say whatever 
 thou desirest, for, by Allah, I will in no wise abandon thee, 
 for ever." 
 
 Fanaticism, here baffled, sought an outlet elsewhere. As 
 usual the weak and the unprotected became the first victims
 
 ISLAM. 107 
 
 and martyrs to their faith, whilst others apostatised, until 
 Mohammed himself advised his converts to go to Abyssinia, 
 where there ruled a pious and just king, and where they 
 would find protection. Here also, when Meccan ambassadors 
 pursued them, and tried to obtain their extradition, they 
 declared their creed to the Negus in these words : — 
 
 " We lived in ignorance, in idolatry, and unchastity, the strong oppressed 
 the weak, we spoke ivntrath, we violated the duties of hospitality. Then 
 a prophet arose, one whom we knew from our youth, with whose descent, 
 and conduct, and good faith, and morality we are all well acquainted. He 
 told us to worship one God, to speak the truth, to keep good faith, to 
 assist our relations, to fulfil the rights of hospitality, to abstain from all 
 things impure, ungodly, unrighteous. And he ordered us to say prayers, 
 give alms, and to fast. We believed in him, we followed him. But 
 our countrymen persecuted us, tortured us. and tried to cause us to for- 
 sake our religion, and now we throw ourselves upon your protection with 
 confidence." 
 
 They then read him the nineteenth chapter of the Koran, 
 which speaks of Christ and John the Baptist, and they all 
 wept, and the King dismissed the Meccan messengers, re- 
 fusing to give up the refugees. As to the nature of Christ 
 they gave him a somewhat vague account, with which the 
 King, however, agreed — to his later discomfiture. 
 
 This nineteenth chapter, which so moved them all, con- 
 tains the story both of the Annunciation of John's birth to 
 Zacharias, and that of Christ's birth to the Virgin. It is 
 here where Maryam = Mary, " the daughter of Annan, the 
 sister of Harun," is described, as in the Gospel of the Infancy, 
 as leaning on a barren trunk of a palm-tree when the throes 
 come upon her, and she cries, " Would to God that I had 
 been dead and forgotten before this." .... And a voice 
 came from within, " Grieve not." And a rivulet gushed 
 forth at her feet, and the erst withered palm glistened with 
 luscious dates. Then, taunted by the people for having 
 borne a child — " her father not being a bad man, nor her 
 mother disreputable " — the child itself, even Christ, to whom 
 she mutely points, answers to everybody's wonderment, out 
 of his cradle, in this wise : " I am a servant of Allah. He 
 has given me the Book, and He has appointed me as a
 
 108 ISLAM. 
 
 Prophet." And a few verses further on, a new rhyme indi- 
 cates the commencement of a new episode, which reads as 
 follows: "This is Jesus, the son of Maryam, according to 
 the true doctrine " (not " the words of truth," as often trans- 
 lated), " which they doubt. It is not fit for God that He 
 should have a son. Praise to Him!" (i.e., far be it from 
 Him). And finally at the end of this same chapter, — 
 
 " They say God has begotten a son. In this ye utter a blasphemy; 
 and but little is wanting but the Heavens should tear open, and the 
 earth cleave asunder, and the mountains fall down, for that they attribute 
 children to the Merciful, whereas it is not meet for God to have children. 
 No one in Heaven and on Earth shall approach the Merciful otherwise 
 than as His servant." 1 . . . 
 
 This is the first Hejrah, the first triumph of the Faith. 
 Hut meanwhile Mohammed himself had recanted, apostatised 
 — twice. AYhi:-j the small band were proclaiming the purity 
 of his Kevelation before the Negus of Abyssinia, Mohammed 
 had gone to the Kaaba and in his sorely embittered state of 
 mind, finding* himself alienated from everybody, in the midst 
 of an absolutely hopeless, almost single-handed struggle, 
 invoked, before the assembled Koreish, their three popular 
 idols — "' the sublime swans," whose intercession might be 
 sought. The Assembly were delighted, and, though they 
 despised his feebleness, they yet wished to put an end to 
 the unseemly strife, and forthwith declared their readiness 
 to believe in his doctrine, since it embraced the worship of 
 their ancient gods. But on the day following Mohammed 
 publicly rescinded that declaration. " The devil had prompted 
 him," he declared boldly, and bitterer waxed the feud than 
 before. But his mind was, as we said, in a sorely vexed state 
 at that time. He was low spirited, nervous, full of fear, and 
 he was still ready to make concessions. To escape abuse he 
 at about the same period declared that he had been com- 
 manded to permit the continuation of sacrifices to the idols ; 
 and then he repented again, and verses expressive of his 
 contrition at his momentary weakness came and comforted 
 
 1 Compare above, p. 88.
 
 ISLAM. 109 
 
 him in the midst of the new troubles caused by his recanta- 
 tion. At that time it was also that great comfort came to 
 him in the conversion of those two : Hamza, called the Lion 
 of God, and Omar, the Paul of Islam, whilom Mohammed'.'? 
 bitterest adversary, who had entered the house of Mohammed 
 girded with his sword, resolved on slaying him, and who 
 returned a Muslim, the most zealous apostle of the faith,, 
 its most valiant defender and mainstay. Among the twelve 
 of whom we spoke, Abu Bakr and Hamza became the prin- 
 cipal heads and mainsprings of young Islam. 
 
 And now the breach in the clan was completed. The 
 whole family of Mohammed, the Hashimites, were excom- 
 municated. Great hardships ensued for both sides for the 
 space of three years, until when both were anxious to remove 
 the excommunication, the document itself was found to have 
 been destroyed by worins — all but the name of God with 
 which it commenced. While thus, on the one hand, Mo- 
 hammed's star seemed in the ascendant, he having forced, 
 if not recognition, at any rate toleration, a bitter grief befel 
 him. Chadija, sixty-five years of age, died ; shortly after 
 his protector, Abu Talib : and, as if to fill the cup of his 
 misery, he now became aware also that he was a beo-o-ar. 
 As long as Chadija lived she provided for him, leaving him 
 to believe in his prosperity. For he was chiefly occupied 
 with his Eevelations, and with going about preaching to the 
 caravans, the pilgrims, the people, at the fairs. And behind 
 him went his other uncle, like a grim shadow, and when he 
 exhorted the people to repeat after him : " There is no God 
 but Allah," and promised that they Mould all be kings if 
 they did — as indeed they became ; Abu Lahab " the squinter,'* 
 with his two black side-curls, would mock at him, call him 
 a liar and a Sabian. And the people mocked after him, 
 and drove him away, and said " Surely your own kinsfolk 
 must know best what sort of a prophet you be." This Abu 
 Lahab now had to stand forward, and as kinsman to take 
 upon himself the galling charge of protecting Mohammed, 
 whom he loathed. Abu Talib had resisted on his death-bed 
 the entreaties both of Mohammed and of the Koreish — the
 
 110 ISLAM. 
 
 one trying to induce him to embrace Islam, the others to 
 give up his nephew. He did neither, and thus left the 
 matter where it was. But Mohammed felt the awkwardness 
 and danger of his position as the protected of his great foe 
 very keenly, and he resolved to turn away from the place of 
 his birth, even as Abraham had done, and Moses, and other 
 prophets, and try to gain a hearing elsewhere. He accord- 
 ingly went to Tayif, within three days' journey of Mecca, but 
 lie was unsuccessful. They hinted that his life would not be 
 safe among them. The rabble hooted and pelted him with 
 stones. He returned with a sad heart. On his road he 
 stopped, and preached. And as whilom the stones had said 
 Amen to the blind Saint's sermon, so now, legend says, the 
 Jin listened to his words, as men would not hear him. And 
 when Zaid, who went with him, asked him how he dared to 
 return to the Koreish, he replied, " God will find means 
 to protect His religion and His prophet." 
 
 And in the midst of these vicissitudes the event happened 
 without which Mohammedanism would never have been heard 
 •of, save as one of the thousand outbreaks of sectarianism. 
 
 Medina, then Yathrib, was inhabited by a great number 
 of Jews. They had, as mentioned before, an academy, where 
 both Halachah and Haggadah were expounded, though verv 
 unostentatiously. They lived in peace and friendship witli 
 their neighbours, but had often religious conversations with 
 them, in which the idolaters fared badly enough. With 
 keenness of intellect, with sudden sparks of esprit, witli all 
 the arts of casuistry, they showed them the inanity of their 
 form of belief. They further, as the keepers of holy books, 
 told them such legends and tales about their common an- 
 cestor Abraham, their common kinsman Ishmael, and all 
 that befel those before, and those after them, that their 
 imagination was kindled, their heart moved, their intellect 
 fired, and that secretly they could not but agree to the mental 
 and religious superiority of these their neighbours. But their 
 Arab pride would not yield ; and when they openly denied 
 this superiority of Faith, the Jews would tell them that their 
 Messiah would come and punish them for their unbelief,
 
 ISLAM. Ill 
 
 even as the unbelief of the legendary aborigines who had 
 lived there before them had been punished. 
 
 When the few pilgrims who had patiently listened to 
 Mohammed, at his many preachings, brought back the 
 strange tidings to Medina that a certain man of good family 
 had publicly renounced the old gods, and had spoken of the 
 God of Abraham, and of his mission to convert his brethren 
 to him, not a Jew, not preaching Judaism, but an Arab, a 
 Gentile like themselves, a man of their own kith and kin, 
 a man who had gradually acquired a certain position and 
 following in spite of all attacks and hindrances, it struck 
 some of the advanced and far-seeing men of that city, that 
 this was an opportunity not to be lost. If their people, " in 
 whom more dissension was to be found than in any other on 
 the face of the earth," could be united by one pure faith, 
 which was emphatically their own, and which, though ac- 
 knowledging some of the fundamental truths of Judaism, did 
 not acknowledge Judaism itself, it would be a vast achieve- 
 ment ; and if, farther, they would acknowledge the coming 
 man, the Messiah, with whom they had been threatened by 
 the Jews, before even these knew of him, they would gain 
 a doubly brilliant victory. And they went to Mohammed 
 secretly as a deputation, and told him that if he were capable 
 of creating that union, religious and political, which was 
 needed, they would acknowledge him to be the foretold 
 prophet, and " the greatest man that ever lived." 
 
 Mohammed then recited to them a brief summary of the 
 commandments — to worship but One God, not to steal, not 
 to commit adultery, not to kill their children, not to slander, 
 and to obey his authority in things " right and just," which 
 they repeated after him. This is called the women's vow, 
 because the same points were afterwards repeated for the 
 benefit of the women in the Koran, and because there was 
 no mention of fighting for the faith in this formula. 
 
 Shortly after this a solemn and secret compact was entered 
 into between another influential deputation from Medina and 
 himself: in the stillness of night, "so that the sleeper should 
 not be awakened, and the absent not be waited for." Here
 
 112 ISLAM. 
 
 he more fully declared Lis faith. There are, he told them, 
 many forms of Islam or Monotheism ; and each takes a 
 different kind of worship or outer garment. The real points 
 consist of the belief in the Resurrection, in the Day of 
 Judgment, and, above all, unconditional faith in one only 
 God, Allah, unto whom utter submission is due, and who 
 alone is to be feared and worshipped. Other essential points 
 are consistency in misfortune, prayer, and charity. 
 
 Whereupon they swore allegiance into his hands. This 
 over, he selected twelve men among them — Jesus had chosen 
 twelve Apostles, and Moses his elders of the tribes of Israel, 
 he said — and exhorted those who had not been chosen, 
 not to be angry in their hearts, inasmuch as not he but 
 Gabriel had determined the choice. These were the twelve 
 " Bishops " (Nakib), while the other men of Medina are 
 called " Aids " (Ansar). 
 
 Secretly as these things had been done, they soon became 
 known in Mecca, and now not a moment was to be lost. The 
 Koreish could no longer brook this ; Mohammed's folly had 
 become dangerous. About one hundred families of influence 
 in Mecca, who believed in the Prophet, silently disappeared, 
 by twos, and threes, and fours, and went to Medina, where 
 they were received with enthusiasm. Entire quarters of the 
 city thus became deserted, and Otba, at the sight of these 
 vacant abodes, once teeming with life, " sighed heavily," and 
 recited the old verse : "Every dwelling-place, even if it have 
 been blessed "ever so long, at last will become a prey to wind 
 and woe." ..." And," he bitterly added, " all this is the 
 work of our noble nephew, who hath scattered our assem- 
 blies, ruined our affairs, and created dissension among us." 
 The position now grew day by day more embarrassing. A 
 blow had to be struck. Still Mohammed was in Mecca, he, 
 Ali, and Abu Bakr. An assembly of the Koreish met in all 
 despatch at the town-hall, and some chiefs of other clans 
 were invited to attend. The matter had become a question 
 for the commonwealth, not for a tribe. — And the Devil also 
 came, according to the legend, in the guise of a venerable 
 sheikh. Stormy was the meeting, for the men began to be
 
 ISLAM. 113 
 
 afraid. Imprisonment for life, perpetual exile, and finally 
 death, were proposed. It is for this that Satan is wanted by 
 the legend. No Arab would have counselled death for Mo- 
 hammed. The last proposal was accepted ; its execution 
 deferred to the first dark night. A number of noble youths 
 were to do the bloody deed. Meanwhile they watched his 
 house to prevent his escape. 
 
 But meanwhile, also, " the angel Gabriel " had told Mo- 
 hammed what his enemies had planned against him. And 
 he put his own green garment upon Ali, bade him lie on 
 his own bed, and escaped, as David had escaped, through 
 the window. A price was set upon his head. Abu Bakr, the 
 " sole companion," was with him. They hid in a cave in 
 the direction opposite from that leading to Medina, on Mount 
 Thaur. A spider wove his web over the mouth of the cave, 
 relate the traditions. Be it observed, by the way, that even 
 this spider and web belong to the Haggadah, and are found 
 in the Targuin to the ninety-fifth Psalm, where David is, by 
 these means, hidden from his enemies. Two wild pigeons 
 laid their eggs at the entrance of the cave, so that the 
 pursuers were convinced that none could have entered it for 
 many a long day ; and the pigeons were blessed ever after 
 and made sacred within the Holy Territory. Once or twice 
 danger was nigh, and Abu Bakr began to fear. " They were 
 but two," he said. " Nay," Mohammed said, " we are three ; 
 God is with us." And He was with them. It was a hot day 
 in September, 622, when Mohammed entered Yathrib, from 
 that time forth honoured by the name of Medinat An-Nabi, 
 the City of the Prophet, at noon : — ten, thirteen, or fifteen 
 years (the traditions vary) after his assumption of the sacred 
 office. This is the Hejrah, or Mohammedan Era, which 
 dates from the first month of the first lunar year after the 
 Prophet's entry into the city. A Jew watching on a tower 
 espied him first, in order that there might be fulfilled the 
 words of the Koran, " The Jews know him better than 
 they know their own children." Before entering the gate 
 he alighted from his camel and prayed. 
 
 From that time forth Mohammed's life, hitherto obscure 
 
 i
 
 114 ISLAM. 
 
 and dark, stands out in its minutest details. He now is; 
 judge, lawgiver, king ; even to the day of his death. We 
 shall leave our readers to follow out the minutiae of his life 
 in any of the biographies at their hand, whieh, from this 
 period forth, no longer differ in any essential point. 
 
 But here we turn at once to that period of his open dis- 
 sensions with the Jews, who, as we said already, formed a 
 very influential section at Medina. He had by degrees come 
 to sanction and adopt as much of their dogmas, their legends, 
 their ceremonies, as ever was compatible with his mission as 
 a Prophet of the Arabs, and one who, barring the funda- 
 mental dogma of the Sonship, wished to conciliate also the 
 Christians. He constantly refers to the testimony of the 
 Jews, calls thorn the first receivers of the Law, and not 
 merely in such matters as turning in prayer towards Jeru- 
 salem, instead of the national sanctuary, the Kaaba, he had 
 followed them— nay, at Medina he even adopted the Day of 
 Atonement, date, name, and all. All he wanted in return 
 was that they should acknowledge him as the Prophet of the 
 Gentiles ( Ummi), and testify to his mission. But the veil 
 had suddenly been torn from the eyes of these Jews. If they 
 had thought him a meet instrument to convert all Arabia to 
 Judaism, and had eagerly fostered and encouraged him, had 
 instructed him in law and legend, and had caused him to 
 believe in himself and his mission, they of a sudden became 
 aware that their supposed tool had become a thing of ever- 
 growing power ; and they had recourse to the most danger- 
 ous arms imaginable for laying that ghost which they had 
 helped to raise. They laughed at him publicly. They told 
 stories of how he came by his " Bevelations." They who had 
 been so anxious to inure him into the Midrash, challenged 
 him by silly questions on Haggadistic lore, — to which he was 
 imprudent enough to give serious replies, — to prove his Mes- 
 siahship, with which they unceasingly taunted him. They 
 produced the Bible, and showed how different the tales he 
 told of the patriarchs and others were from those contained 
 in that book: they who had begotten this Haggadistic guise 
 themselves. Of course the stories did not agree, and even. 
 
 '
 
 ISLAM. 115 
 
 Christians (Ornayyah and others) testified to that fact. What 
 remained for Mohammed but to declare that, in those in- 
 stances, both Jews and Christians had falsified their books ? or 
 that they did not understand them — applying to them the 
 rabbinical designation of certain scholars : that though they 
 had the books, they were but " as asses laden with them," 
 and comprehended not their contents ; or that they gave out 
 foolish stories to be the Book itself. He now declared that, 
 " of all men, Jews and Idolaters hate the Muslims most." 
 And, in truth, when asked whether they preferred Moham- 
 med's teaching or Idolatry, they would reply — as their an- 
 cestors had done centuries before — " Idolatry : — since idola- 
 ters did not know any better, whilst there were those who 
 knowingly perverted the pure doctrine, and sowed strife and 
 dissension between Israel and their Father which is in 
 Heaven." Some Jewish fanatics even attempted his life — 
 one, innocently enough, by witchcraft ; another, by the more 
 earnest missile of a stone. They wrote satires and squibs 
 upon him, men and women. There was no end to their provo- 
 cations. They mispronounced his Koranic words — " twisting 
 their tongues " — so as to give them an offensive meaning. 
 Their " look down upon us," sounded like "O our wicked one." 
 For " forgiveness " they said " sin ; " for " peace upon thee " 
 — " contempt upon thee," and the like. They mocked at his 
 expression of " giving God a good loan " — " we being rich 
 and He poor !" they said — evidently forgetting the similar ex- 
 pressions of the Mishnah itself, which speaks of certain good 
 deeds l as bringing interest in this world, while the capital is 
 reserved for the next. And the inevitable happened. The 
 breach came to pass, and there was hatred even unto death 
 on both sides. It was too late to substitute another faith, 
 other doctrines, other legends, even had they been at hand. 
 But as much as could be done without endangering the whole 
 structure, to show the irreconcilable breach, was done now. 
 
 1 Such as reverence for father and 
 mother, charity, early application to 
 study, hospitality, doing the last 
 
 honours to the dead, promoting peace 
 between man and his neighbour. See 
 page 34. 
 
 i 2
 
 11C ISLAM. 
 
 The faithful were no longer to turn their faces towards Jeru- 
 salem, but towards Mecca. Friday was made the day of rest, 
 and the call to prayer was introduced as a supposed protest 
 against the trumpet of the synagogue, though the trumpet 
 was scarcely ever used for the purpose of the call to prayer. 
 The Jews were not to be saluted in the streets ; the faithful 
 were to abstain from eating with them ; they are declared 
 beyond the pale — and bitterly had they to rue their lost 
 game. 
 
 In the first year of the Hejrah Mohammed proclaimed war 
 against the enemies of the faith. At Badr the Muslims first 
 stood face to face with the Meccans, and routed them, though 
 but 316 against GOO. The Koreish and certain Jewish tribes 
 Avere the next object of warfare. Six years after the Flight 
 he proclaimed a general pilgrimage to Mecca. Its inhabi- 
 tants though prohibiting this, concluded a peace with him, 
 whereby he was recognised as a belligerent, and the pilgrim- 
 age was carried out the very next year. Next other Jewish 
 tribes had to feel his iron rod, whilst he nearly lost his life at 
 the 1 lands of a Jewess, another Judith, who tried to poison 
 him, and, when charged with the crime, said that she had 
 only wished to see whether 3[ohammed really was a Prophet, 
 and now she was convinced of it. She thus saved her own 
 life; but the poison worked on, and in his dying hour Mo- 
 hammed spoke of that poison " cutting his heart strings." 
 His missionaries now sought a larger sphere than Arabia. 
 Letters were sent by him to Heraclius, to the Governor of 
 Egypt, to Abyssinia, to Chosroes II.., to Amra the Ghas- 
 sanide. The latter resented this as an insult, executed the 
 messenger, and the first war between Islam and Christianity 
 broke out. Islam was beaten. Mecca at these news rose 
 anew, threw off the mask of friendship, and broke the alli- 
 ance. Whereupon Mohammed marched of a sudden 10,000 
 men strong upon them before they had time for any prepa- 
 ration, took Mecca by storm, and was publicly acknowledged 
 chief and prophet. More strife and more, chiefly minor, 
 contests followed, in which he was more or less victorious. 
 In the year ten of the Hejrah he undertook his last solemn
 
 ISLAM. 117 
 
 pilgrimage to Mecca, with at least 40,000 Muslims, and 
 there on Mount Arafat blessed them, like Moses, and re- 
 peated his last exhortations ; chiefly telling them to protect 
 the weak, the poor, and the women, and to abstain from 
 usury. 
 
 Once again he thought of war. He planned a huge expe- 
 dition against the Greeks; but he felt death approaching. 
 One night, at midnight, he went to the cemetery of Medina, 
 and prayed and wept upon the tombs, and asked God's bless- 
 ing for his " companions resting in peace." Next day he 
 went to the mosque as usual, ascended the pulpit, and com- 
 menced his exhortation with these words : " There was once 
 a servant unto whom God had given the option of whatever 
 worldly goods he would desire, or the rewards that are near 
 God ; and he chose those which are near God." And Abu 
 Bakr, hearing these words, wept and said, " May our fathers 
 and mothers, our lives and our goods, be a sacrifice for you, 
 messenger of God." And the people marvelled at these 
 words. They wist not that the prophet spoke of his near 
 death, but Abu Bakr knew. For a few more days Moham- 
 med went about as usual ; but terrible headaches, accom- 
 panied by feverish symptoms, soon forced him to seek rest. 
 He chose Ayisha's house close to the mosque, and there took 
 part as long as he could in public prayers. For the last time 
 he addressed the faithful, asking them, like Moses, whether 
 he had -wronged any one, or whether he owed aught to any 
 one. To round the story off right realistically, there was an 
 imbecile present who claimed certain unpaid pennies ; which 
 were immediately refunded to him, though not without a 
 bitter word. He then read passages from the Koran pre- 
 paring them for his death, and exhorted them to keep peace 
 among themselves. Never after that hour did he ascend the 
 pulpit, says the tradition, " till the day of the Resurrection." 
 Whether he intended to appoint a successor — Mosaylima, 
 perhaps, the pseudo-prophet, as Sprenger suggests — or not, 
 must always remain a mystery. It is well known that the 
 writing-materials for which he had asked were not given to 
 him. Perhaps they did think him delirious, as they said.
 
 US ISLAM. 
 
 Some medicine was given to him, accompanied by certain 
 superstitious rites and formulas. He protested with horror 
 when he became aware of this. He wandered; somewhat 
 of Heaven and Angels were his last words — " Denizens of 
 Heaven . . . Sons of Abraham . . . prophets . . . they fall 
 down, weeping, glorifying His Majesty. . . ." Ayisha, in 
 whose lap his head rested, felt it growing heavy and heavier : 
 she looked into his face, saw his eyes gazing upwards, and 
 heard him murmuring : " No, the companions above ... in 
 Paradise." She then took his hand in hers, praying. When 
 she let it sink, it was cold and dead. This happened about 
 noon of Monday (12th or 11th) of the third month in the 
 11th year of the Hejrah (8th June, 632). Terrible was the 
 distress which the news of his death caused. Many of the 
 faithful refused to believe in it, and Omar confirmed them in 
 their doubt. But Abu Bakr sprang forth, saying, " Whoso- 
 ever among you has believed in Mohammed, let him know 
 that Mohammed is dead ; but he who has believed in Mo- 
 hammed's God, let him continue to serve Him, for He is still 
 alive and never dies. . . ." 
 
 We have in this succinct review of the stages through 
 which Mohammed went, carefully abstained from pronouncing 
 upon him ex cathedra, from accusing or defending him. All 
 this has been done, and public opinion is at rest on the point, 
 for instance, of his marrying many wives, or committing 
 wholesale slaughter when an example had to be made. Also 
 with regard to his " cunning," and " craftiness," and the rest 
 of it. There is, Mohammedans tell us now, polygamy and 
 massacre enough and to spare in the Bible, and its heroes are 
 in no wise exempt from human frailties. Moreover, " far- 
 sighted prudence and energetic action" — provided always 
 that they belong to the victorious camp — are not considered 
 very grave faults. But we have also abstained from adducing 
 many Koranic passages, however tempting it was to substi- 
 tute for our own sober account the gluwing words of " in- 
 spiration " — the cry out of the depths of an intensely human 
 heart in its sore agony — the wail over the peace that is lost 
 — the exultant bugle-call that proclaims the God-given tri-
 
 ISLAM. 
 
 119 
 
 annph — the yell of revenge, or the silent anguish, and the 
 unheard, the unseen tear of a man. These things do indeed 
 write a more faithful biography than the acutest historian 
 will ever compile out of the infinite and infinitesimal mosaics 
 at his disposal. 
 
 Mohammed has had many biographers, from the Byzan- 
 tines who could not satisfy their souls with heaping up 
 mountains of silly abuse from Maracci and Prideaux — the 
 former of whom has, not without some show of reason, been 
 accused of being a secret believer, while the latter wishes to 
 stop by his biography, " the great prevailing infidelity in the 
 present age," more especially as he has reason to fear that 
 "" wrath hath some time gone forth from the Lord," and that 
 the " Wicked One may, by some other such instrument, over- 
 whelm us with foulest delusions " — to those great authorities, 
 Sprenger, Muir, Noldeke, "Weil, Amari. The work of the 
 first of these we have placed at the head of our paper because 
 it is the most comprehensive, the most exhaustive, the most 
 learned of all, because, more than any of the others, it does, 
 by bringing all the material bodily before the reader, enable 
 him to form his own judgment. Next to him in fulness and 
 genuineness of matter, though not in genius perhaps, stands, 
 to our thinking, Muir; only that a certain preconceived 
 notion anent Satan seems to have taken somewhat too firm a 
 hold upon his mind. Both Muir and Sprenger have drunk 
 out of the fulness of the East in the East, spending part of 
 their lives in research on Indian and Mohammedan soil. 
 Weil, Amari, Noldeke, 1 have earned the first places among 
 Koranic investigators in Europe, while Lane, that most 
 illustrious master of Arab lexicography, has, both in his 
 classical Notes on the "Arabian Nights " and in his " Modern 
 Egyptians," thrown out most precious hints on the subject. 
 And those that have written his life have all written it out 
 of his book, the Koran, and its complement the Sunnah, and. 
 each has written it differently. 
 
 1 We may on another occasion enter 
 more fully upon the individual merits 
 of their works, and those of many 
 
 others in this large field : for the 
 present, a bare reference to them must 
 :-umee.
 
 120 ISLAM. 
 
 The Koran is a wonderful book in many respects, but 
 chiefly in this, that it lias no real beginning, middle, or end. 
 Mohammed's mind is best portrayed here. It was not a 
 well-regulated mind. Weil, in touching terms, almost appeals 
 to the shadow of Mohammed to come and enlighten him as 
 to what he said, when he said it, how he said it. He cannot 
 forgive him, he states at the commencement of his " Intro- 
 duction," that lie did not put everything clearly and properly 
 in order before his death — even as a man sends his '' copy " 
 to the printers. From date-leaves and tablets of white stone, 
 from shoulder-bones and bits of parchment, thrown promiscu- 
 ously into a box, and from " the breasts of men," was the first 
 edition of the Koran prepared, one year after the prophet's 
 death, and the single chapters were arranged according to 
 their respective lengths: organ-pipe fashion — and not even 
 that accurately. And Mohammed's book is not even as the 
 Pentateuch, according to the Documentary Theory. There 
 are not several accounts of the same or different events 
 vaguely put together. Nor is it even like the Talmud, which, 
 though apparently leading us by the Ariadne-thread of the 
 Mishnah through its labyrinths, yet every now and then 
 plunges us into pathless wildernesses of cave and vault ; 
 through which ever and anon streams in the golden light 
 of day, showing the wise aim and plan of their tortuous 
 windings. But in the Koranic structure there is no canning, 
 no special purpose, and, indeed, you may begin at every page 
 and end at every page. Unless one should prefer to read it 
 from beginning to end — and we warrant that, as it now 
 stands, no one will easily perform that feat, unless he be a 
 pious Muslim, or, perchance, makes it his Arabic text-book. 
 Hence also not one of these savans agrees about the succes- 
 sion of the Chapters. There is certainly a vast amount of 
 truth or probability on the side of some suggestions; and 
 Sprenger has, to our mind, come nearest, because he was the 
 least fettered by conventionalities of view, but, son of the 
 Alps and of the Desert, he set authority at defiance and 
 sought out his path for himself. Yet with him, too, it is 
 difficult to agree at times, according to the greater or less
 
 ISLAM. 121 
 
 sympathy one feels with his stand-point and the view he 
 takes of the Prophet himself. 
 
 Broadly speaking, three principal divisions may, with 
 psychological truth, be established ; the first, corresponding 
 to the period of early struggles, being marked by the higher 
 poetical flight, by the deeper appreciation of the beauties of 
 nature, in sudden, most passionate, lava-like outbursts, which 
 seem scarcely to articulate themselves into words. The more 
 prosaic and didactic tone warns us of the approach of man- 
 hood, while the dogmatising, the sermonising, the reiteration, 
 and the abandoning of all Scriptural and Haggadistic help- 
 mates point to the secure possession of power, to the consum- 
 mation and completion of the mission. But these divisions 
 must not be relied upon too securely. There rings through 
 what may fairly be considered some of the very last Revela- 
 tions ever and anon the old wild cry of doubt and despair ; 
 the sermon turns abruptly into a glowing vision ; a sudden 
 rhapsody inappropriately follows a small dogmatic disqui- 
 sition, or a curse fiery and yelling as any of the hottest days 
 is hurled upon some unbeliever's doomed head; while the 
 very first utterances at times exhibit the theorising, reflecting, 
 arguing tendencies of ripe old age. 
 
 And it is exactly in these transitions, quick and sudden as 
 lightning, that one of the great charms of the book, as it 
 now stands, consists: well might Goethe say that "as 
 often as we approach it, it always proves repulsive anew ; 
 gradually, however, it attracts, it astonishes, and, in the end, 
 forces into admiration." The Koran, moreover, suffers more 
 than any other book we could think of by a translation, 
 however masterly. If anywhere, it is here that the summum 
 jus summa injuria holds good. What makes the Talmud so 
 particularly delightful is this peculiar fact, that whenever 
 jurisprudence with its thousand technicalities and uncouth 
 terms is out of the question, it becomes easy, translucent, 
 and clear to the merest beginner. The pathetic naivete of 
 its diction, and the evident pains it takes to make all its 
 sayings household words, is something for which we cannot 
 be too grateful. Hence also the fact that these words in
 
 122 ISLAM. 
 
 their wisdom and grace must needs find an echo in every 
 true heart, if told exactly as they stand, without attempt 
 to colour them. The grandeur of the Koran, on the other 
 hand, consists, its contents apart, in its diction. We cannot 
 explain the peculiarly dignified, impressive, sonorous nature 
 of Semitic sound and parlance; its sesquipedalia verha, with 
 their crowd of prefixes and affixes, each of them affirming 
 its own position, while consciously bearing upon and influ- 
 encing the central root — which they envelop like a garment 
 of many folds, or as chosen courtiers move round the anointed 
 person of the King. 
 
 May be, some stray reader remembers a certain thrill on 
 waking suddenly in the middle of his first night on Eastern 
 soil — waking, as it were, from dream into dream. For there 
 came a voice, solitary, sweet, sonorous, floating from on high 
 through the moonlight stillness — the voice of the blind 
 Mueddin, singing the Ulah, or first Call to Prayer. At the 
 sound whereof many a white figure would move silently on 
 the low roofs, and not merely, like the palms and cypresses 
 around, bow his head, but prostrate, and bend his knees. And 
 the sounds went and came, " Allahu Akbar .... Prayer 
 is better than sleep .... There is no God but He .... 
 He giveth life, and He dieth not .... Oh ! thou Bountiful 
 .... Thy mercy ceaseth not .... My sins are great, 
 greater is Thy mercy .... I extol his perfection .... 
 Allahu Akbar ! " — and this reader may have a vague notion 
 of Arabic and Koranic sound, one which he will never forget. 
 
 But the Koran is sui generis, though its contents be often 
 but the old wine in new bottles, and its form strikingly 
 resembling that of pre-Islamic poetry, which it condemns. 
 It is rhythmical, rhymed, condescends to word-plays, and 
 indulges — and in one place to an appalling degree — in 
 refrains: As usual, the rhyme — the swaddling clothes of 
 unborn thought — here too seems to run away at times, if 
 not with the sense, at all events with the numbers. Yet 
 not far ; only that for the sake of the soft dual termination 
 certain gardens and fountains and fruits are doubled : whilst 
 on the other hand a lofty contempt for this thraldom is
 
 ISLAM. 123 
 
 shown by m being made to answer to n, I to r, and so forth. 
 Yet here, as in all these critical exoteric questions, we are 
 treading on very dangerous ground, and we shall content 
 ourselves with mentioning that there are at least three prin- 
 cipal schools at variance on the very question whether the 
 Koran is rhymed throughout : one affirming it, the other 
 denying it, and the third taking a middle course. 
 
 We reserve all that we have to say on the outer or critical 
 aspect of the Koran for the present; the scientific terms on 
 this field : rules, divisions, and subdivisions, most minute and 
 manifold, and the entire Masoretic apparatus, with all the 
 striking analogies with the corresponding Jewish labours 
 that reveal themselves at every step. 
 
 We turn, in preference, at once to the intrinsic portion of 
 this strange book — a book by the aid of which the Arabs 
 conquered a world greater than that of Alexander the Great, 
 greater than that of Borne, and in as many tens of years as 
 the latter had wanted hundreds to accomplish her conquests ; 
 by the aid of which they, alone of all the Shemites, came 
 to Europe as kings, whither the Phoenicians had come as 
 tradesmen, and the Jews as fugitives or captives ; came to 
 Europe to hold up, together with these fugitives, the light 
 to Humanity — they alone, while darkness lay around; to 
 raise up the wisdom and knowledge of Hellas from the dead, 
 to teach philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and the golden 
 art of song to the West as well as to the East, to stand at 
 the cradle of modern science, and to cause us late epigoni 
 for ever to weep over the day when Granada fell. 
 
 We said that there is a great likeness between pre-Islamic 
 poetry (even that of those inane " priests ") and the Koran. 
 If Mohamined wished to go straight to the heart of his people, 
 it could only be through the hallowed means of poetry — the 
 sole vehicle of all their " science," all tradition, all religion, 
 all love, and all hatred. And, indeed, what has remained of 
 fragments of that period of pre-Islamic poetry which imme- 
 diately preceded Mohammed, broken, defaced, dimmed, as it 
 is ; by fanaticism and pedantic ignorance, prove it sufficiently 
 to have been of all the brilliant periods of Arabic literature the
 
 124 ISLAM. 
 
 most brilliant. There arises out of the Hamasa, the Moalla- 
 kat, the Kitab, Al-Aghani, nay, out of the very chips that lie 
 embedded in later works, such a freshness, and glory, and 
 bloom, of desert-song — even as out of Homer's epics rise the 
 glowing spring-times of humanity and the deep blue heavens 
 of Hellas — as has never again been the portion of Arab poetry. 
 Wild, and vast, and monotonous as the yellow seas of its 
 desert solitudes, it is withal tender, true, pathetic, soul- 
 subduing; much more so than when in beauteous Andalus 
 the great-grandchildren of these wild rovers sang of nightly 
 boatings by torchlight, of the moon's rays trembling on the 
 waves, of sweet meetings in the depths of rose-gardens, of 
 Spain's golden cities and gleaming mosques, and the far 
 away burning desert whence their fathers came. Those grand 
 accents of joy and sorrow, of love, and valour, and passion, 
 of which but faint echoes strike on our ears now, were full- 
 toned at the time of Mohammed ; and he had not merely 
 to rival the illustrious of the illustrious, but to excel them ; 
 to appeal to the superiority of what he said and sang as 
 a very sign and proof of his mission. And there were, at 
 first, many and sinister tokens of rivalry and professional 
 hatred visible, to which religious fanaticism carried fuel. 
 Those that had fallen fighting against him were lamented 
 over in the most heartrending and popular dirges. Foets of 
 his time said even as Jehuda Al-Hassan-Halevi, that great 
 Hebrreo-Arabic minstrel, did hundreds of years after them, 
 that they failed to see anything extraordinary in his verses. 
 Nay, they called him names, — a fool, a madman, a ridiculous 
 pretender and impostor; they laughed at the people of 
 Medina for listening to "such an one." And these rival- 
 poets formed a formidable power. Their squibs told, while 
 the counter-satires he caused to be written fell flat. Not even 
 "sudden visitations," by which some of the worst offenders 
 were found struck to death, stopped the " press." Until 
 there came a revelation — " Shall I declare unto you," he 
 asks in the Surah called " the Poets," " on whom the Devils 
 descend? They descend upon every lying and wicked person 
 . . . most of them are liars. And those who err follow the
 
 ISLAM. 125 
 
 steps of the poets. Seest thou not how they rove as bereft 
 of their senses through every valley ? " . . . Which reminds 
 ns strikingly of Kutayir, a pre-Islamic poet, and the answer 
 he gave to people asking him "How he managed when 
 poetry became difficult to him?" and he said, "I walk 
 through the deserted habitations and through the blooming 
 greenswards ; then the most perfect songs become easy, and 
 the most beautiful ones flow naturally " — " roving bereft of 
 his senses through every valley !".... 
 
 Mohammed is said to have convinced a rival, Lebid, a 
 poet-laureate of the period, of his mission, by reciting to 
 him a portion of the now second Surah. Unquestionably 
 it is one of the very grandest specimens of Koranic or Arabic 
 diction, describing how hypocrites " are like unto those who 
 kindle a fire without, and think themselves safe from dark- 
 ness. But while it is at its biggest blaze, God sends a wind ; 
 the flame is extinguished, and they are shrouded in dense 
 night. They are deaf, and dumb, and blind. ... Or when 
 in darkness, and amidst thunder and lightning, rain-filled 
 clouds pour from heaven, they in terror of the crash thrust 
 
 their fingers into their ears But God compasseth the 
 
 infidels around The flash of the lightning blindeth 
 
 their eyes — while it lights up all things, they walk in its 
 light — then darkness closes in upon them, and they stand 
 rooted to the ground." 
 
 But even descriptions of this kind, grand as they be in 
 their own tongue, are not sufficient to kindle and preserve 
 the enthusiasm and the faith and the hope of a nation like 
 the Arabs, not for one generation, but for a thousand. Not 
 the most passionate grandeur, not the most striking similes, 
 not the legends, not the parables, not the sweet spell of 
 rhyme-fall and the weaving of rhythmic melodies, and all 
 the poet's cunning craft — but the kernel of it all, the doc- 
 trine, the positive, clear, distinct doctrine. And this doctrine 
 Mohammed brought before them in a thousand, so to say, 
 symphonic variations, modulated through the whole scale 
 of human feeling. From prayer to curse, from despair to 
 exultant joy, from argument, often casuistic, largely-spun-out
 
 120 ISLAM. 
 
 argument, to vision, either in swift, and sudden, and terrible 
 transition, or in repetitions and reiterations — monotonous 
 and dreary and insufferably tedious to the outsider — but to 
 him alone. 
 
 The poets before him had sung of love. One of the prin- 
 cipal forms of pre-Islamie poetry was, indeed, the Kasida, 
 which almost invariably commenced with a sorrowful remem- 
 brance of her who had gone none knew whither, and the 
 very traces of whose tent, but yesterday gleaming afar in 
 the midst of the wide solitudes, had disappeared overnight. 
 Antara, himself the hero of the most famous novel, sings 
 of the ruins, around which ever hover lovers' thoughts, of 
 the dwelling of Abla, who is gone, and her dwelling-place 
 knows her not ; it is now desolate and silent. Amr Al Kais, 
 " the standard-bearer of poets, but on the way to hell," as 
 Mohammed called him, of all things praises his fortune with 
 women, chiefly Oneisa, and in brilliant, often Heinesque, 
 verse sings of the good things of this world ; until his father 
 banishes him on account of an adventure wherein he, as 
 usual, had been too happy. And of a sudden, in the midst 
 of a wild revel, he hears that his father has been slain, and 
 not a word said he. But higher and louder waxed the revel, 
 and he drank deep, and gamed till the grey dawn; when 
 he arose of a sudden, and swore a holy oath that neither 
 wine nor woman should soothe his senses until he had taken 
 bloody vengeance for his father; and when consulting the 
 oracle, he drew an arrow with the inscription " Defence," he 
 threw it into the idol's face, saying, " Wretch, if thy father 
 had been killed, thou wouldst have counselled Vengeance, 
 not Defence." 
 
 They sang of valour and generosity, of love and strife, and 
 revenge, of their noble tribe and ancestors, of beautiful 
 women, " often even of those who did not exist, so that 
 woman's noble fame should be spread abroad among kings 
 and princes," as the unavoidable scholiast informs us ; of the 
 valiant sword, and the swift camel, and the darling horse, 
 fleeter than the whirlwind's rush. Or of early graves, upon 
 which weeps the morning's cloud, and the fleeting nature of
 
 ISLAM. 127 
 
 life, which comes and goes as the waves of the desert-sand, 
 and as the tents of a caravan, as a flower that shoots up and 
 dies away — while the white stars will rise and set ever- 
 lastingly, and the mountains will rear their heads heaven- 
 wards, and never grow old. Or they shoot their bitter 
 arrows of satire right into the enemy's own soul. 
 
 Mohammed sang none of these. No love-minstrelsy his, 
 not the joys of this world, nor sword nor camel, nor jealousy 
 or human vengeance, not the glories of tribe or ancestor, nor 
 the unmeaning, swiftly and for ever extinguished existence 
 of man, ay ere his themes. He preached Islam. 
 
 And he preached it by rending the skies above and 
 tearing open the ground below, by adjuring heaven and hell, 
 the living and the dead. The Arabs have ever been pro- 
 ficient in the art of swearing, but such swearing had never 
 been heard in and out of Arabia. By the foaming waters 
 and by the grim darkness, by the flaming sun and the setting 
 stars, by Mount Sinai and by Him who spanned the firma- 
 ment, by the human soul and the small voice, by the Kaaba 
 and by the Book, by the Moon and the dawn and the angels, 
 by the ten nights of dread mystery and by the day of judgment. 
 That day of judgment, at the approach whereof the earth 
 shaketh, and the mountains are scattered into dust, and the 
 seas blaze up in fire, and the children's hair grows white 
 with anguish, and like locust-swarms the souls arise out 
 of their graves, and Allah cries to Hell, Art thou filled full ? 
 and Hell cries to Allah, More, give me more, . . . while 
 Paradise opens its blissful gates to the righteous, and glory 
 ineffable awaits them — both men and women. 
 
 The kernel and doctrine of Islam Goethe has found in the 
 second Surah, which begins as follows : — 
 
 " This is the Book. There is no douht in the same. A Guidance tG 
 the righteous. Who believe in the Unseen, who observe the Prayer, and 
 who give Alms of that which we have vouchsafed unto them. And who 
 believe in that which has been sent down unto thee — (the Bevelation} 
 which had been sent down to those before thee, and who believe in the 
 Life to come. They walk in the guidance of their Lord, and they are 
 the blessed. As to them who believe not — it is indifferent to them 
 whether thou exhortest them or not exhortest them. They will not
 
 128 ISLAM. 
 
 believe. Scaled hath Allah their hearts and their ears, and over their 
 eyes is darkness, and theirs will be a great punishment. — ' And in this 
 wise,' Goethe continues, 'we have Surah after Surah. Belief and unbelief 
 are divided into upper and lower. Heaven and hell await the believers or 
 deniers. Detailed injunctions of things allowed and forbidden, legendary 
 stories of Jewish and Christian religion, amplifications of all kinds, bound- 
 less tautologies and repetitions, form the body of this sacred volume, which 
 to us, as often as we approach it, is repellent anew, next attracts us ever 
 anew, and fills us with admiration, and finally forces us into veneration.' " 
 
 Thus Goethe. And no doubt the passage adduced is as g< x id 
 a summary as any other. Perhaps, if he had gone a little 
 further in this same chapter, he might have found one still 
 more explicit. "When Mohammed at Medina told his 
 adherents no longer to turn in prayer towards Jerusalem, 
 but towards the Kaaba at Mecca, to which their fathers had 
 turned, and he was blamed for this innovation, he replied : — 
 
 " That is not righteousness : whether yc turn your faces towards East 
 or AVest, God's is the East as well as the West. But verily righteousness 
 is his who believes in God, in the day of judgment, in the angels, in the 
 Book and the prophets ; who bestows bis wealth, for God's sake, upon 
 kindred, and orphans, and the poor, and the homeless, and all those who 
 ask; and also upon delivering the captives; he who is stedfast in prayer, 
 giveth alms, who stands firmly by his covenants, when he has once entered 
 into them ; and who is patient in adversity, in hardship, and in times of 
 trial. These are the righteous, and these are the God-fearing." 
 
 Yet these and similar passages, characteristic as they be, do 
 not suffice. It behoves us to look somewhat deeper. 
 
 First of all, What is the literal meaning of Islam, the 
 religion of a Muslim ? AVe find that name Muslim already 
 applied to those Hanifs, of whom we have spoken above, 
 who had renounced, though secretly, idolatry before Mo- 
 hammed, and had gone out to seek the " religion of Abra- 
 ham," which Mohammed finally undertook to re-establish. 
 The Semitic root of the word Muslim yields a variety of 
 meanings, and accordingly Muslim has had many interpre- 
 tations. But in all these cases — even as is now becoming so 
 universally clear in the terms of the New Testament — it is 
 as useless to go back to the original root for the elucidation 
 of some special or technical, dogmatic, scientific, or other 
 term of a certain period, as it is to ask those for an explana- 
 
 .
 
 ISLAM. 129 
 
 tion who lived to use that same term long after it had 
 •assumed an utterly new, often the very opposite, meaning. 
 Sahn, the root of Islam, means, in the first instance, to 
 be tranquil, atr rest, to have done one's duty, to have paid 
 up, to be at perfect peace, and, finally, to hand oneself 
 over to Him with whom peace is made. The noun 
 derived from it means peace, greeting, safety, salvation. 
 And the Talmud contains both the term and the explana- 
 tion of the term Muslim, which in its Chaldee meaning had 
 become naturalised in Arabia. It indicates a " Righteous 
 man." In a paraphrase of Proverbs xxiv. 16, where the 
 original has ZadiJc (Ziddih in Koran), which is rightly 
 translated by the Authorised Version, "Just Man," the 
 Talmud has this very word. " Seven pits are laid for the 
 * Muslim,' " (Shcdmana — Syr. Msahnond) it says, and " one 
 for the wicked, but the wicked falls into his one, while 
 the other escapes all seven." 1 The word thus implies 
 absolute submission to God's will — as generally assumed — 
 neither in the first instance, nor exclusively, but means, 
 on the contrary, one who strives after righteousness with his 
 own strength. Closely connected with the misapprehension 
 of this part of Mohammed's original doctrine is also the 
 popular notion on that supposed bane of Islam, Fatalism : 
 but we must content ourselves here with the observation 
 that, as far as Mohammed and the Koran are concerned, 
 Fatalism is an utter and absolute invention. Not once, 
 but repeatedly, and as if to guard against such an assumption, 
 Mohammed denies it as distinctly as he can, and fives 
 injunctions which show as indisputably as can be that 
 nothing was further from his mind than that pious state 
 of idle and hopeless inanity and stagnation. But to return 
 to Islam. The real sum and substance of it is contained in 
 Mohammed's words : " We have spoken unto thee by 
 revelation: — Follow the religion of Abraham." .... 
 
 1 There is also the story in the I and thy teaching is peace (perfect) 
 Talmud of the Master whose name and thou ha.-st made peace between 
 was Shalman (Solomon), and they the disciples." 
 said to him, "Thou art full of peace, | 
 
 K
 
 130 ISLAM. 
 
 "What did Mohammed and Lis contemporaries understand 
 by this religion of Abraham ? " Abraham/' says the Koran, 
 pointedly and pregnantly, " was neither a Jew nor a Chris- 
 tian, but he was pious and righteous, and no idolater." 
 Have we not here the briefest and the most rationalistic 
 doctrine ever preached? Curious and characteristic is the 
 proof which the Koran finds it necessary to allege (partly 
 found, by the way, in the Midrash) for this : — There was no 
 Law (or Gospel) revealed then — there were, in fact, no 
 divisions of Semitic creed, no special and distinctive dogmas 
 in Abraham's time yet. The Haggadah, it is true, points 
 out that, when Scripture says "he heard my voice," it 
 meant that to him were given, by anticipation, all that 
 the Law and the Prophets contain. And in order rightly to 
 understand the drift of Mohammed's words, we must en- 
 deavour to gather the little mosaics as they lie scattered 
 about in all directions in the Talmud and Midrash. Per- 
 chance a picture, anent Abraham's faith and works, may 
 arise under our hands — a not unworthy ideal of Judaism, 
 which formed it, and Mohammedanism, whicli adopted it ; of 
 Abraham, the righteous, the first, and the greatest Muslim. 
 It may also further elucidate, by the way, the words of 
 the Mishnah, " Be ye of the Disciples of Abraham." " The 
 divine light lay hidden," says the Midrash, " until Abraham 
 came and discovered it." 
 
 Again we have to turn — driven by absolute necessity — to 
 one of those indigestible morsels, one of the many cruces of 
 the exegetes of Orient and Occident. The word used in the 
 Koran for the " Eeligion of Abraham " is generally MilJa. 
 Sprenger, after ridiculing the indeed absurd attempts made 
 to derive it from an Arabic root, concludes that it must be a 
 foreign word, introduced by the teachers of the "Milla of 
 Abraham " into the Hejaz. He is perfectly right. Milk = 
 Memra = Logos, are identical: being the Hebrew, Chaldee 
 (Targum, Peshito in slightly varied spelling), and Greek 
 terms respectively for " Word," — that surrogate for the 
 Divine Name used by the Targum, by Philo, by St. John. 
 This Milla, or " Word," which Abraham proclaimed, he,
 
 ISLAM. 131 
 
 " who was not an astrologer, but a prophet "- — teaches, ac- 
 cording to the Haggadah, first of all, the existence of One 
 God, the Creator of the Universe, who rules this Universe 
 with mercy and lovingkindness. 1 He alone also, neither 
 angel nor planet, guides the destinies of man. Idolatry, even 
 when combined with the belief in Him, is utterly to be ab- 
 horred ; He alone is to be worshipped ; in Him alone trust is 
 to be placed in adversity. He frees the persecuted and the 
 oppressed. You must pray to Him and serve Him in love, 
 and not murmur when He asks for your lives, or even for 
 lives still dearer to you than your own. As to duties towards 
 man, it teaches — " Lovingkindness and mercy are the tokens 
 of the faith of Abraham." " He who is not merciful is not 
 of the children of Abraham." " What is the distinguishing 
 quality of Abraham's descendants ? their compassion and 
 their mercy." (Be it observed, by the way, that in all these 
 Talmudical passages the word Bachman is used, which term 
 for "Merciful" forms an emphatic mark in the Koran.) 
 " Abraham not merely forgave Abimelech, but he prayed for 
 liim ; " and this mercy, charity, and lovingkindness is to be 
 extended to every being, without reference to " garment," 
 birth, rank, creed, or nationality. Disinterestedness and un- 
 selfishness are self-understood duties. Though the whole land 
 had been promised to Abraham by God, he bought the ground 
 for Sarah's tomb. After the victorious campaign he took 
 nothing, no, not even " from a thread to a shoe-latchet " from 
 the enemy. Modesty and humility are other qualities en- 
 joined by him. Rule yourself, he said, before you rule 
 others. Eschew pride, which shortens life — modesty pro- 
 longs it. It purifies from all sins, and is the best weapon 
 
 1 "God," says the Talmud, in 
 boldest transcendental flight, " prays." 
 And what is that prayer? — "Be it 
 my will that my mercy overpower my 
 justice." The Koran says: — "God 
 has laid down for Himself the Law 
 of Mercy." 
 
 God's Mercy, says the Midrash, 
 was the only link that held the uni- 
 verse together before the " Law " 
 came to be revealed to man. And 
 very beautifully does the Haggadistic ' pentance : — then it stood." 
 
 K 2 
 
 version of the manner in which the 
 universe, which, spite of all, would 
 not rest firmly, but kept swaying to 
 and fro in space, " even as a great 
 palace built of mortal man, the foun- 
 dations whereof are not firmly laid," 
 contrast from all those well-known 
 wild heapings-up of monsters be- 
 gotten for steadying purposes. — " The 
 earth shook and trembled, and would 
 not find rest until God created Re-
 
 132 ISLAM. 
 
 for conquest. His humility was shown even by the way in 
 which he exercised his hospitality. He waited himself on 
 his guests, and when they tried to thank him, he said, 
 " Thank Him, the One, who nourisheth all, who ruleth in 
 heaven and earth, who killeth and giveth life, who causeth 
 the plants to grow, and who createth man according to His 
 Avisdom." He inaugurated the Morning Prayer — even as did 
 Isaac that of the Evening, and Jacob that of the Night. He 
 went, even in his old age, ever restless in doing good, to 
 succour the oppressed, to teach and preach to all men. He 
 " wore a jewel round his neck, the light of which raised up 
 the bowed-down and healed the sick, and which, after his 
 death, was placed among the stars." And see how he was 
 chosen to be tempted with the bitterest trial, in order that 
 mankind might see how steadfast he remained — " even as 
 the potter proves the strength of his ware, not by that which 
 is brittle, but by that which is strong." And when he died, 
 he left to his children four guardian angels — " Justice and 
 Mercy, Love and Charity." 
 
 Such are the floating outlines of the faith of Abraham 
 to be gathered from the Haggadah ; and these traits form 
 the fundamental bases of Mohammed's doctrine — often in 
 the very words, always in the sense, of these Jewish tradi- 
 tions. The most emphatic moment, however, we find laid 
 upon the Unity of God, the absence of Intermediators, and 
 the repudiation of any special, exclusive, "privileged" creed. 
 This is a point on which the Talmud is very strong — not 
 merely declaring its aversion to proselytism, but actually 
 calling every righteous man, so that he be no idolater, a 
 "Jew" to all intents and purposes. The tracing of the 
 minutiae of general human ethics is, comparatively speaking, 
 of less import, considering that these, in their outlines, are 
 wonderfully alike, in Hellas and India, and Koine and Persia 
 and Japan ; so that it would indeed be difficult to say who 
 first invented the great law of goodwill towards fellow- 
 creatures. But the manner and the words in which these 
 things are inculcated, mark their birthplace and the stages 
 of their journey clearly enough in the Semitic creeds.
 
 ISLAM. 133 
 
 And with the doctrines — if so we may call them — of 
 Abraham, as we gathered them from the Jewish writings, 
 Mohammed also introduced the whole legendary cycle that 
 surrounds Abraham's head, like a halo, in these same 
 writings. We have in the Koran, first of all, that wondrous 
 Haggadistic explanation, how Abraham first came to worship, 
 in the midst of idolaters, the One invisible God — how he 
 first lifted up his eyes heavenwards and saw a brilliant star, 
 and said, This is God. But when the star paled before the 
 brightness of the moon, he said, This is God. And then the 
 sun rose and Abraham saw God in the golden glory of the 
 sun. But the sun, too, set, and Abraham said, '•' Then none 
 of you is God ; but there is one above you who created both 
 you and me. Him alone will I worship, the Maker of 
 Heaven and Earth ! " How he then took an axe and de- 
 stroyed all the idols and placed the axe in the hands of the 
 biggest, accusing him of the deed ; how he is thrown into 
 the fiery furnace, and God said to the fire, " Be thou cold ; " 
 how he entertained the Angels, and how he brought his 
 beloved son to the Altar, and an " excellent victim " (a ram 
 from Paradise) was sacrificed in his stead ; and so on. All 
 this, though only sketched in its outlines in the Koran, is 
 absolute Haggadah, with scarcely as much of alteration as 
 would naturally be expected in the like fantastic matter, 
 even as is the rest of that " entire world of pious biblical 
 legend which Islam has said and sung in its many tongues, 
 to the delight of the wise and simple, for twelve centuries 
 now, to be found either in embryo or fully developed in the 
 Haggadah." » 
 
 But here, in the midst of our discourse, we are compelled 
 to break off, reserving its continuation : notably with regard 
 to the theoretical and practical bearing of the religion of 
 Mohammed, and the relation of its religious terms 2 and 
 
 1 See page 48. i Scriptures), Rabbi (teacher), Sabbath 
 
 2 E.g. Koran, Forkan ( = Pirke, ex- (day of rest), Mishnah (Oral Law), 
 position of Halachah), Torah (Law), , &c, all of which are bodily found in 
 Shechiuah (presence of God), Gan j the Koran, as well as even such 
 Eden (Paradise), Gehinnom (Hell), J words as the Hebrew Tarn (for Eed 
 Haber (Master), Darash (search the Sea), &c.
 
 134 ISLAM. 
 
 individual tenets to those of Judaism ; also its progress and 
 the changes wrought within the community by many and 
 most daring sects ; and the present aspect of the Faith and 
 its general influence. And this our Exordium we will sum 
 up with the beginning of the Surah, called the Assembly, 
 revealed at Medina : — 
 
 " Iu the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate Whatsoever is 
 in heaven and on earth praises God the King, the Holy One, the Almighty, 
 the Allwise. It is He who out of the midst of the illiterate Arabs has 
 raised an Apostle to show unto them his signs, and to sanctify them, and 
 to teach them the Scripture and the Wisdom, them who before had been 
 
 in great darkness This is God's free Grace, which Hegiveth unto 
 
 whomsoever He wills. God is of great Mercy ! "
 
 ( 135 ) 
 
 III. 
 
 NOTES OF A LECTUKE ON THE 
 TALMUD. 1 
 
 Mr. Deutsch began his lecture by speaking of the various 
 and contradictory ideas people had about the Talmud : some 
 believing it to be almost divine : others that it was nothing 
 but folly and childishness. Those who investigated the book 
 were, he said, like those explorers sent by Moses into the 
 Promised Land, the majority of whom returned with tales of 
 iron walls and monstrous giants, while a few came back 
 carrying a huge bunch of delicious grapes. Many were the 
 striking and poetical similes suggested by that strange work, 
 such as an ocean, or a buried city ; but speaking of it strictly 
 as a book, the nearest approach to it was Hansard. Like 
 Hansard, it is a law-book : a miscellaneous collection of 
 Parliamentary debates, of bills, motions, and resolutions ; 
 with this difference that in Hansard these propositions, bills, 
 and motions, gradually grow into an Act: while in the 
 Talmud the Act is the starting-point, and the debates its 
 consequence. The disquisitions in the Talmud seek to evolve 
 the reasons for the Act out of Scripture, of which itself is a 
 development and an outgrowth ; while at the same time, 
 supplementary paragraphs are constantly drawn out of its 
 own legal text. These bills or Acts are called the Mishnah, 
 both collectively and individually ; the discussions, Gemara ; 
 both together, Talmud. 
 
 The Talmud, however, contains a vast deal more than 
 
 1 Delivered on Friday evening, May 15, 1868, at the Koyal Institution of 
 Great Britain, Albemarle Street.
 
 136 NOTES OF A LECTURE 
 
 Hansard : it is not confined to strictly legal matters. All 
 those manifold assemblies wherein a people's mental, social, 
 and religious life are considered and developed, are here 
 represented. Parliament, Convocation, Law-Courts, Acade- 
 mies, Colleges, the Temple and the Synagogue — even the 
 Lobby and the Common Koom have left realistic traces 
 upon it. The authors of this book, who may be counted by 
 hundreds, were always the most prominent men of the people 
 in their respective generations ; and thus undesignedly and 
 designedly show the fulness and the various phases of this- 
 people's life and progress at every turn. 
 
 The Talmud, in this wise, contains besides the social, 
 criminal, international, human and divine Law, along with 
 abundant explanations of Laws not perfectly comprehended, 
 corollaries and inferences from the Law, that were handed 
 down with more or less religious reverence, an account also 
 of the education, the arts, the science, the history, and 
 religion of this people for about a thousand years: most 
 fully perhaps of the time immediately preceding and follow- 
 ing the birth of Christianity. It shows us the teeming streets 
 of Jerusalem, the tradesman at his work, the women in their 
 domestic circle, even the children at play in the market- 
 place. The Priest and the Levite ministering in their holy 
 sites, the preacher on the hillside surrounded by the multi- 
 tude, even the story-teller in the bazaar : they all live, move 
 and have their being in these pages. Nor is it Jerusalem or 
 even the hallowed soil of Juda?a alone, but the whole antique 
 world that seems to lie embalmed in it : we find here the 
 most curious notices of the religion of Zoroaster — how it 
 gradually was restored to its original status ; as if all things 
 which had dropped out of the records of antique humanity 
 had taken refuge in the Talmud. 
 
 Athens and Alexandria, Persia and Kome, their civiliza- 
 tions and religions old and new are represented at every 
 turn. That cosmopolitanism which for good or evil has ever 
 been the characteristic trait of the Jewish people, and which 
 was, in fact, the highest type of teaching, is most vividly 
 represented in this book. One of the most striking historical
 
 ON THE TALMUD. 137 
 
 points is their always coming in contact, generally against 
 their will, with the most prominent nations, exactly at the 
 moment when the latter seem to have reached the highest 
 point of culture in their own development. Passing over the 
 three different stages of the people as Hebrews, Israelites, 
 Jews — names which have a distinct significance — we find 
 them connected with Chaldea, Egypt, Phoenicia, Assyria,. 
 Babylonia, Persia, Greece, Koine, Arabia. Yet that cosmo- 
 politanism never for one moment interfered with the most 
 marked mental individuality. There always remained the 
 one central sun, the Bible: around this ever revolved that 
 great Cosmos, the Talmud — wild and vague, though it may 
 be — and from it, as shown in the Gemara, the Mishnah is 
 begotten. 
 
 The Talmud has been harshly dealt with, more owing to 
 the blunders of friends than of foes. Some people have 
 supposed that whatever any Jew wrote was a Talmud : others- 
 have spoken of it as a revelation, and claimed inspiration for 
 it. The fact is, that what each of these men wrote was 
 purely his own : and no one of them would have claimed 
 more for them than that they were his own utterances. And 
 it was only because some of the laws or injunctions in it were 
 attributed to Moses on Mount Sinai, that any sort of divinity 
 was predicated of it. 
 
 As to its " dates," nothing can be more authentic than the 
 memory of the East. The Talmud has been preserved with 
 absolute authenticity, in the memory of doctors and disciples, 
 in the same way as many Brahmins and Parsee priests can 
 repeat, without the variation of a single accent, entire Vedas 
 and other chapters of their sacred books, although without 
 the slightest conception of their contents, and wholly igno- 
 rant of their meaning. The same Mas true of the followers 
 of Zoroaster. At the same time, there is no doubt, that 
 much was written down by way of note by scribes, who yet 
 did not venture upon the work of redaction. What alterations 
 there are in the Talmud are owing to censors who changed 
 passages that were supposed to clash with Christianity, and 
 produced the most singular obscurities. The censor's work
 
 138 NOTES OF A LECTURE 
 
 was fruitless, for in reality there was nothing in the genuine 
 Talmud to be taken out. 
 
 But indeed we have, apart from the clearest and most 
 irrefutable evidences of witnesses, all the ordinary internal 
 evidences of history. We have an array of carefully pre- 
 served historical names and dates from beginning to end ; 
 names and dates, the general faithfulness and truth of which 
 have never yet been called into question. From the Great 
 Synagogue down to the final completion of the Babylonian 
 Gemara, we have the legal and philosophical development of 
 the nation always embodied as it were in the successive 
 principal schools and men of their times. Its chief im- 
 portance for religious history is the manner in which it 
 informs us of things and circumstances at the time of the 
 birth of Christianity, among the Priests and Pharisees, of 
 the education, synagogues, preaching, of women, of angels 
 and demons, &c. It gives us the ethical sayings, the parables, 
 gnomes, &c, which were the principal vehicle of the common 
 Jewish teaching from an almost pre-historic period. These 
 sayings were often tender, poetical, sublime : but they were 
 not absolutely new: there was not one that was not sub- 
 stantially contained in the canonical and uncanonical 
 writings of the Old Testament. 
 
 Here also, we find the first cry of separation between 
 Church and State : the first antagonism or contest of cere- 
 monialism and free investigation. The Priests were the 
 representatives of a privileged class, and, it must always 
 be remembered, of one family. The first revolt against this 
 system we have in the story of Korah. It was doubtless 
 good for the Jews at that time, and for centuries after that 
 revolt was quelled : they could scarcely have got on without 
 the Sacrifices, Temple, and all its concomitants ; but after 
 the Babylonian captivity when idolatry had died out, learn- 
 ing became of higher moment. The Priests had sadly dete- 
 riorated as a body, with some bright exceptions, since the 
 days of the Maccabees, when they by an accident suddenly 
 found themselves in political power. From being, as Moses 
 intended them to be, the receivers of the people's free gifts,
 
 ON THE TALMUD. 139 
 
 their messengers — not mediators — and their teachers, they 
 had become, chiefly in the tipper strata, an encroaching and 
 ignorant faction. The ordinary priests Jiad mostly sunk into 
 mere local functionaries of the Temple, while many of the 
 High Priests, who in their later days bought their sacred 
 office from the ruling foreign power, had forgotten the very 
 elements of that Bible which they had been especially 
 appointed to teach. Bui a 4rong re-action set in. The 
 Pharisees, in view of the clouds that they saw gathering- 
 round the Commonwealth, had but one cry — Education : 
 catholic, compulsory and gratuitous. The watchwords re- 
 sounding from one end of the Talmud to the other are the 
 words, " learn — teach ; teach — learn." The Priesthood, the 
 Sacrifices, the Temple, as fchey all went Mown at one sudden 
 blow, seemed scarcely to leave a gap in the religious life of 
 the nation. The Pharisees had long before undermined 
 these things, or rather transplanted them, into the people's 
 homes and heart. Every man in Israel, they said, is a 
 priest, every man's house a temple, every man's table an 
 altar, every man's prayer his sacrifice. Long before the 
 Temple fell, it had been virtually superseded by hundreds of 
 synagogues, schools, and colleges, where laymen read and 
 expounded the Law and the Prophets. The Priest as such, 
 or the Levite, played but a very insignificant part in the 
 synagogue and school. The function of pronouncing the 
 '*' Benediction " on certain occasions, and a kind of vague 
 "precedence" was all that the synagogue had preserved of 
 the former high estate of the sons of Aaron. Yet on the 
 other hand, many of these men, having lost their former 
 privileges, applied themselves all the more vigorously to 
 study, and to the great national work of Education. Nor 
 was there any real personal an agonism between the " phari- 
 saical" or "popular" party, and the descendants of the 
 "sacred" tribe and family. There is on the contrary a 
 legend, one of the most cherished of all the legends (as 
 usual faithfully interpreting the people's real feeling), which 
 tells how, when the enemy entered the Holy of Holies, the
 
 140 NOTES OF A LECTURE 
 
 Priests and Levites, led by the venerable High Priest him- 
 self, bearing aloft the golden key of the sanctuary, were seen 
 ascending to the highest summit, and then precipitating 
 themselves, with all the tokens and emblems of their sacred 
 trust, into the blazing ruins of the Temple — rather than 
 deliver them up to the conquerors ! 
 
 Strenuously and indefatigably, we have said, the Pharisees 
 advocated education ; and by their unceasing efforts, hundreds 
 of synagogues, colleges, and schools arose, not only in Judaea, 
 but throughout the whole Koman Empire. Over Judaea, 
 after many unsuccessful attempts, education was made com- 
 pulsory everywhere except in Galilee. Peculiar circum- 
 stances arising out of its geographical position behind 
 Samaria and Phoenicia, had reduced that beautiful country 
 to be the Boeotia of Palestine. The faulty pronunciation of 
 its inhabitants was the standing joke of the witty denizens 
 of the metropolis. After the fall of Jerusalem, however, this 
 was altered ; and Galilee became in her turn, the seat of 
 some of the most exalted Academies. 
 
 The regulations and provisions for public instruction were 
 extremely strict and minute. The number of children al- 
 lotted to one teacher, the school buildings and their sites, 
 the road even that led to them, everything was considered - r 
 no less the age of the pupils and the duties of the parents 
 with regard to preliminary preparation and continuous 
 domestic supervision of their tasks. The subjects, the 
 method, the gradual weaning even of the pupil into a 
 teacher or helpmate of his fellow-pupils — all these things 
 are carefully exposed in the Talmud. Above all is the great 
 principle Non multa sed multum, the motto of all schooling 
 in the Talmud. Good fundamental grounding, elementary 
 maternal teaching, and constant repetition are some of the' 
 chief principles laid down. The teachers, in most cases> 
 taught gratuitously: considering theirs a holy and godly 
 office, for which the reward would surely not tail them. The 
 relation between master and disciple was generally that of 
 father and child, or friend and friend. Next to Law, Ethics,
 
 OX THE TALMUD. 141 
 
 History, and Grammar — Languages were one of the prin- 
 cipal subjects of study. We hear of Coptic, Aramaic, 
 Persian, Median, Latin, but above all Greek. The terms 
 in which this last language is spoken of verge indeed on 
 the transcendental. This also is the only language which 
 it seems to have been incumbent to teach even to girls. 
 Medicine was another necessary subject of instruction : the 
 hygienic laws and the anatomical knowledge (bound up with 
 religion) transmitted to us in the book show indeed no small 
 proficiency for its time. Mathematics and astronomy formed 
 another part of instruction, and were indeed considered in- 
 dispensable. We hear of men to whom the ways of the 
 stars in the skies were as familiar as the streets of their 
 native city, and others who could compute the number of 
 drops in the ocean, who foretold the appearance of comets, 
 &c. Next came Natural History, chiefly Botany and 
 Zoology. The highest point, however, was reached in Juris- 
 prudence, which formed the most extensive and thoroughly 
 national study. 
 
 . The chief aim and end of all learning — the Talmud is 
 never tired of repeating — is doing. All knowledge is but a step 
 to " modesty and the fear of heaven ;" and innumerable are 
 the parables whereby this lesson is inculcated. After briefly 
 adverting to Prayers and Sermons and the whole worship 
 of Temple and Synagogue at the time of Christ, the speaker 
 turned to the "political " portions of the "Law " under con- 
 sideration, and having pointed out how almost the modem 
 theory of constitutionalism was contained in it, briefly 
 touched upon the relationship between Eoyalty, State, and 
 subjects, and the provisions for taxes, for war, the legislative 
 and judicial powers, &c. Both this, the legal, and the other, 
 the ethical part of the book — so closely intertwined that 
 they can hardly be separated — may be said to grow out 
 chiefly of one fundamental axiom of the Talmud, viz. the 
 utter and absolute equality of all men and the obligation to 
 " follow God," by imitating the mercy attributed to Him by 
 Scripture. No book can possibly point out in stronger
 
 142 NOTES OF A LECTURE 
 
 lana-ua^e than the Talmud dor-?, the extreme sinfulness 
 of sin. 
 
 Next the speaker alluded to the holy influence exercised 
 by the women, of whom the Talmud not only records the 
 noblest deeds, but whom, even as the angels themselves, it 
 makes at times the bearers of most sublime thoughts. Re- 
 garding the latter, it was shown at some length how both 
 they and their counterparts " the demons" were — though 
 partly adopted from Persian or rather Zoroastrian meta- 
 physics — made the vehicles of national Jewish doctrines. 
 Indeed, all those pantheistic and dualistic principles which 
 the people had gathered from the creed of other nations, 
 were transformed under the skilful hand of the Talmudical 
 masters into strictly monotheistic elements, by being either 
 idealized into abstract notions of right and wrong, or sur- 
 rounded by a poetical halo which deprived them of any real 
 existence. Thus Satan (Sammael, the "Primeval Serpent"), 
 though mythologically his functions are precisely similar to 
 those of the Persian "Evil Spirit," i.e. those of Seducer, 
 Accuser, and Angel of Death, is yet explained away philo- 
 sophically as meaning merely "Passion," which seduces, 
 produces remorse, and kills. The demons are said to have 
 masks before their faces, which fall only when the sin is 
 committed ; it is then only that, as bitter self-reproaches, 
 they surround the sinner on all sides. Another instance 
 of this is the legend of Isaac, in which " Satan," as the 
 Angel of Death, appears first as an accuser of Abraham 
 (as of Job) before God, next as a seducer to Abraham in the 
 garb of an old man, to Isaac in that of a youth, finally to 
 Sarah, informing her of the danger in which her son had 
 been placed. There is also the legend of the death of 
 Moses, in which Satan, eager to vanquish the "divine man," 
 is thwarted by God's Name even to the end. 
 
 In the same manner Asmodeus (the Persian Acslima) 
 " Lilith," and the rest of the demoniacal powers, as well as 
 those allegorical monsters the " Leviathans," the " Cocks," 
 the " Bulls," and the rest of the ever-repeated reproaches to
 
 ON THE TALMUD. Ho 
 
 the Talmud, have to play their instructive part. All these 
 are taken almost bodily from the Zendavesta, which in itself 
 represents more or less a protest against the Vedic faith. 
 They are either reduced into their original meanings in the 
 Talmud, or they are ridiculed and made to inculcate some 
 moral lesson. On the other hand the famous "Sea Fairy 
 Tales," taken from Vedic sources, are made into guises of 
 political, if not religious satires. When the Persians broke 
 off from the Indians, the good gods of the old system became 
 the bad gods of the new, and vice versa. 
 
 After dwelling on the causes of the obscurity of some of 
 the matters found in the Talmud and their apparent want 
 of dignity — occasioned partly by the circumstances and the 
 manners of the period, and partly by the neglect of copyists, 
 and the undying fanaticism which ever tried to " improve " 
 this important record of humanity — the speaker instanced 
 the various modes in which the Talmudical authors figured to 
 themselves the Messianic times, and the utter and absolute 
 freedom with which they expressed their opinion on this as 
 on every other religious topic. Every sermon, every dis- 
 course that treated of holy things ended with the one com- 
 prehensive formula " And may to Sion come the Eedeemer ! " 
 The opinions of the modes and objects of his coming are 
 many and various ; the Talmud records them all equally, 
 faithfully, and without comment, save that to him who says 
 the Messiah is no longer to be expected, it adds, " May God 
 forgive him ! " 
 
 Further remarks on the value of the Talmud as a " human 
 study " in our days, and the scientific manner in which it 
 should be treated, followed. It required, the speaker said, a 
 certain system and method entirely of its own, being ■ itself 
 in almost every respect an exceptional work. Above all, 
 however, the investigator should not only be armed with 
 patience and perseverance such as is scarcely needed for any 
 other branch of study, but he must leave all and every 
 prejudice, religious and otherwise, behind him. Then, 
 and then only, might he hope to gather in it some of the
 
 144 NOTES OF A LECTURE ON THE TALMUD. 
 
 richest and most rjrccious fruits of human thought and 
 fancy. 
 
 The legend of Elijah standing on the mountains of Judaea 
 three days before the appearance of the Messiah, proclaiming 
 peace and redemption to all mankind, followed by the 
 legendary vision of the final consummation of all things, 
 and of the abolition of Hell and Death, — one of the grand- 
 est legends ever conceived, — formed the conclusion of the 
 discourse. 

 
 ( 145 ) 
 
 
 IV. 
 A LECTURE 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE 
 
 MIDLAND INSTITUTE, BIRMINGHAM. 
 
 December 7, 1868. 
 
 Dr. Emanuel Dedtsch explained that the Talmud is the 
 work which embodies the civil and canonical law of the 
 Jewish people ; that it consists of the Mishnah, or text, and 
 the commentar}^ or Gemara : that its contents have reference 
 not merely to religion, but also to philosophy, medicine, 
 history, jurisprudence, and the various branches of practical 
 duty ; that it is, in fact, a law civil and criminal, national 
 and international, human and divine, forming a kind of 
 supplement to the Pentateuch — a supplement such as it 
 took 1000 years of a nation's life to produce ; and that it 
 is not merely a dull treatise, but it appeals to the imagina- 
 tion and the feelings, and to all that is noblest and purest ; 
 that between the rugged boulders of the law which bestrew 
 the pass of the Talmud there grow the blue Bowers of 
 romance and poetry, in the most catholic and Eastern sense. 
 Parable, tale, gnome, saga — its elements are taken from 
 heaven and earth ; but chiefly and most lovingly from the 
 human heart and from Scripture, for every verse and every 
 word in this latter became, as it were, a golden nail upon 
 which it hung its gorgeous tapestries. But it would be a great 
 mistake to suppose that the poet's cunning had been at work 
 in the Talmud. It was only his heart. The chief feature 
 and charm of its contents lay in their utter naivete. Taken 
 
 L
 
 116 LECTURE AT THE MIDLAND INSTITUTE. 
 
 up, as they appeared, at random, and told in their simple, 
 inartistic, unconscious form, they touched the soul. But 
 nothing could be much more distressing than to attempt to 
 take them out of their antique garb and press them into 
 some kind of modern fashionable dress ; or worse still, to 
 systematise and methodise them. It would be as well to 
 attempt to systematise the songs of the bird in the wood, or 
 a mother's parting blessing. He had, however, to endeavour 
 to reproduce a portion of the contents of the Talmud, in 
 their own vague sequence and phraseology ; and he should 
 confine himself almost to smaller productions, as parables, 
 apophthegms, allegories, and the like minute things, which 
 were most characteristic, and required little explanation. 
 
 The fundamental law of all human and social economy in 
 the Talmud was the utter and absolute equality of man. 
 It was pointed out that man was created alone — not more 
 than one at different times, lest one should say to another, 
 " I am of the better or earlier stock." And it failed not to 
 mention that man was created on the last day, and that 
 even the gnat was of more ancient lineage than man. In a 
 discussion which arose among the doctors as to which was 
 the most important passage in the whole Bible, one pointed 
 to the verse, " And thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy- 
 self." The other contradicted him and pointed to the 
 words, " And these are the generations of man " — not black, 
 not white, not great, not small — but man. 
 
 Or, again, they pointed out the words, " And these are 
 the ordinances by which men shall live " — not the priest, or 
 the levitc — but men. The law given on Mount Sinai, the 
 masters said, though emphatically addressed to one people, 
 belonged to all humanity. It was not given in any King's 
 land, not in any city, or inhabited spot, lest the other 
 nations might say, " We know nothing of it." It was given 
 on God's own highway, in the desert — not in the darkness 
 and stillness of night, but in plain day, amid thunder and 
 lightning. And why was it given on Sinai ? Because it is 
 the lowliest and the meekest of the mountains — to show 
 that God's spirit rests only upon them that are meek and
 
 LECTURE AT THE MIDLAND INSTITUTE. 147 
 
 lowly in their hearts. The Talmud taught that religion 
 was not a thing of creed or dogma [or faith merely, but of 
 active goodness. Scripture said, "Ye shall walk in the 
 words of the Lord." " But the Lord is a consuming fire — 
 how can man walk in His way^? " " By being," they 
 answered, " as He is — merciful, loving,pong-suffering. Mark 
 how on the first page of the Pentateuch God clothed the 
 naked — Adam ; and on the last He buries the dead — Moses. 
 He heals the sick, frees the captives, does good to His 
 enemies, and He is merciful both to the living and to the 
 dead." 
 
 In close connection with this stood the relationship of 
 men to their neighbours — chiefly to those beyond the pale 
 of creed or nationality. The Talmud distinctly and strongly 
 set its face against proselytism, pronouncing it to be even 
 dangerous to the commonwealth. There was no occasion, it 
 said, for conversion to Judaism, as long as a man fulfilled 
 the seven fundamental laws. Every man who did so was 
 regarded as a believer to all intents and purposes. It even 
 went so far as to call every righteous man an Israelite. 
 Distinct injunctions were laid down with regard to proselytes. 
 They were to be discouraged and warned off, and told that 
 the miseries, privations, and persecutions which they wished 
 to take upon themselves were unnecessary, inasmuch as 
 all men were God's children, and might inherit the here- 
 after ; but if they persisted, they were to be received, and 
 were to be ever afterwards treated tenderly. They illus- 
 trated this by a beautiful parable of a deer coming from the 
 forest among a flock of sheep, and being driven off at night 
 and the gate shut against it, but being after many trials, at 
 length received and treated with more tenderness than any 
 of the sheep. Next stood reverence both for age and youth. 
 They pointed out that not merely the tables of the law 
 which Moses brought down the second time from Sinai, but 
 also those which he broke in his rage, were carefully placed 
 in God's tabernacle, though useless. Eeverence old age. 
 But all their most transcendental love was lavished on chil- 
 dren. All the verses of Scripture that spoke of flowers and 
 
 l 2
 
 148 LECTURE AT THE MIDLAND INSTITUTE. 
 
 gardens were applied to children and schools. "Do not 
 touch mine anointed ones, and do my prophets no harm." 
 " Mine anointed ones " were school children, and " my pro- 
 phets " their teachers. 
 
 The highest and most exalted title which they bestowed 
 in their most poetical flights upon God himself was that of 
 " Pedagogue of Man." There was drought and the most 
 pious men prayed and wept for rain, but none came. An 
 insignificant-looking person at length prayed to Him who 
 caused the wind to blow and the rain to fall, and instantly 
 the heavens covered themselves with clouds, and the rain 
 fell. " Who are you," they cried, " whose prayers alone 
 have prevailed ? " And he answered, " I am a teacher of 
 little children." When God intended to give the law to the 
 people, He asked them whom they would offer as their 
 guarantees that they would keep it holy, and they said 
 Abraham. God said, " Abraham has sinned — Isaac, Jacob, 
 Moses himself — they have all sinned ; I cannot accept them." 
 Then they said " May our children be our witnesses and our 
 guarantees." " And God accepted them ; even as it is 
 written " From the mouths of the wee babes has He founded. 
 His empire." Indeed the relationship of man to God they 
 could not express more pregnantly than by the most familiar 
 words which occurred from one end of the Talmud to the 
 other, " Our Father in Heaven." 
 
 Another simile was that of bride and bridegroom. There 
 was once a man who betrothed himself to a beautiful maiden,, 
 and then went away, and the maiden waited and waited and 
 he came not. Friends and rivals mocked her, and said " He 
 will never come." She went into her room, and took out 
 the letters in which he had promised to be ever faithful. 
 Weeping she road them and was comforted. In time he 
 returned, and enquiring how she had kept her faith so long, 
 she showed him his letters. Israel in misery, in captivity, 
 was mocked by the nations for her hopes of redemption; 
 but Israel went into her schools and synagogues and took 
 out the letters, and was comforted. God would in time 
 redeem her, and say, " How could you alone among all the
 
 LECTURE AT THE MIDLAND INSTITUTE. 149 
 
 mocking nations be faithful ? " Then Israel would point to 
 the law and answer, " Had I not your promise here ? " 
 
 Next to women, angels were the most frequent bearers of 
 some of the sublimest and most ideal notions in the Talmud. 
 " Underneath the wings of the seraphim," said the Talmud, 
 " are stretched the arms of the Divine mercy, ever ready to 
 receive sinners." Every word that emanated from God was 
 transformed into an angel, and every good deed of man 
 became a guardian angel to him. On Friday night, when 
 the Jew left the synagogue, a good angel and a bad angel 
 accompanied him. If, on entering the house, he found the 
 table spread, the lamp lighted, and his wife and children in 
 festive garments, ready to bless the holy day of rest, the 
 good angel said, " May the next Sabbath and all following 
 ones be like unto this ; peace unto this dwelling — peace ! " 
 and the bad angel, against his will, was compelled to say 
 " Amen." If, on the contrary, everything was in confusion, 
 the bad angel rejoiced, and said " May all your Sabbaths and 
 ■week days be like this ; " while the good angel wept and said 
 -" Amen." According to the Talmud, when God was about 
 to create man, great clamouring arose among the heavenly 
 host. Some said, " Create O God a being who shall praise 
 Thee on earth, even as we sing Thy glory in heaven." 
 Others said, " God, create no more ! Man will destroy the 
 glorious harmony which Thou hast set on earth, as in 
 heaven." Of a sudden, God turned to the contesting host 
 of heaven, and deep silence fell upon them all. Then before 
 the throne of glory there appeared bending the knee the 
 Angel of Mercy, and he prayed, " Father, create man. He 
 will be Thine own noble image on earth. I will fill his heart 
 with heavenly pity and sympathy towards all creatures; 
 they will praise Thee through him." And there appeared 
 the Angel of Peace, and wept : " God, man will disturb 
 Thine own peace. Blood will flow ; he will invent war, con- 
 fusion, horror. Thy place will be no longer in the midst of 
 all Thy earthly works." The Angel of Justice cried, " You 
 will judge him, God ! He shall be subject to my law, and 
 peace shall again find a dwelling-place on earth." The
 
 150 LECTURE AT THE MIDLAND INSTITUTE. 
 
 Angel of Truth said, " Father of Truth, cease ! With man 
 you create the lie." Out of the deep silence then was heard 
 the divine word : " You shall go with him — you, mine own 
 Seal, Truth ; but you shall also remain a denizen of heaven 
 — between heaven and earth you shall float, an everlasting 
 link between both." 
 
 The question was asked in the Talmud, why children 
 were born with their hands clenched, and men died with 
 their hands wide open ; and the answer was that on 
 entering the world, man desired to grasp everything, but 
 when he was leaving it all slipped, away. Even as a fox, 
 which saw a fine vineyard, and lusted after its grapes, but 
 was too fat to get in through the only opening there was, 
 until he had fasted three days. He then got in ; but having 
 fed, he could not get out, until he had fasted three days more. 
 " Poor and naked man enters the world ; poor and naked 
 does he leave." To woman the Talmud ascribed all the 
 blessings of the household. From her emanated everything 
 noble, wise, and true. It had not words enough to impress 
 man with the absolute necessity of getting married. Not 
 only was he said to be bereaved of peace, joy, comfort, and 
 faith without a wife, but he was not even called a man. 
 ""Who is best taught?" it asked; and the answer is, "He 
 who has learned first from his mother." 
 
 Alexander the Great was repeatedly spoken of in the 
 Talmud. In his travels in the East, one day he wandered to 
 the gate of Paradise, and knocked. The guardian angel 
 asked, "Who is there?" "Alexander." "Who is Alex- 
 ander ?" " Alexander, you know — the Alexander — Alexander 
 the Great — Conqueror of the world." " We know him not 
 — he cannot enter here. This is the Lord's gate ; only the 
 righteous enter here." Alexander begged something to 
 show he had been there, and a small portion of a skull was 
 given him. He took it away, and showed it contemptuously 
 to his wise men, who brought a pair of scales and placing 
 the bone in one, Alexander put some of his silver and gold 
 against it in the other ; but the silver and gold " kicked the 
 beam." More and more silver and gold were put into the scale
 
 LECTURE AT THE MIDLAND INSTITUTE. 151 
 
 and at last all bis Crown jewels and diadems were in, but 
 tbey all flew upwards like featbers before tbe weigbt of tbe 
 bone. Tben one of tbe wise men took a grain of dust from tbe 
 ground and placing it on tbe bone, tbe scale went up. The 
 bone was tbat wbicb surrounded tbe eye, — and notbing will 
 ever satisfy tbe eye, until grains of dust and asbes are placed 
 upon it, down in tbe grave. 
 
 In bis travels Alexander came to Ethiopia, and a cause 
 was decided in his presence by the king of tbat country. A 
 man who had recently purchased land found a treasure upon 
 it, which was claimed by the seller of the land. The king 
 reconciled the rival claims by suggesting tbat the son of one 
 of tbe men should marry the daughter of the other, and tbat 
 the treasure should be given as the dowry. Alexander was 
 moody, and the King of Ethiopia asked, " Are you dissatisfied 
 with my judgment?" "Well," Alexander said, "I am not 
 dissatisfied ; I only know we should have judged differently 
 in our country." " How ? " " We should of course have 
 taken tbe treasure at once into tbe King's exchequer, and 
 both those men would have been beheaded on the spot." 
 The King of Ethiopia said, " Allow me to ask a question. 
 Does the sun ever shine in your country ? " " Of course." 
 " And does it ever rain ? " " Certainly." " Have you any 
 cattle?" "Yes." "Then that is the reason why the sun 
 shines, and the rain rains — it can't be for you." 
 
 Tbe lecturer concluded by remarking that what he had 
 been able to bring before tbe audience proved as it were but 
 a drop in a vast ocean of the Talmud — that strange, wild, 
 weird ocean, with its leviathans, and its wrecks of golden 
 argosies, and with its forlorn bells that send up their dreamy 
 sounds ever and anon, while the fisherman bends upon his 
 oar, and starts and listens, and perchance the tears may come 
 into his eyes.
 
 ( 153 ) 
 
 V. 
 NOTES OF A LECTURE ON SEMITIC 
 PALAEOGRAPHY. 1 
 
 Closely connected as the sciences of Palaeography and 
 Epigraphy are with, almost every province of historical, 
 chronological, linguistic, and archaeological studies, their 
 Semitic branch was, Mr. Deutsch said, perhaps, of the 
 greatest importance of all. It is only our own generation 
 that seems to have become alive to the fact that our know- 
 ledge both of the East and the beginnings of the West must 
 be sought, or at least complemented, in the East. Con- 
 sidering that most of those earliest Hellenic ornaments — 
 vases and gems, vessels and garments, animals and vegetable 
 substances, weights and measures, and even musical instru- 
 ments, mentioned in the oldest remnants of Greek litera- 
 ture, the Homeric waitings — were imported into Europe, 
 together with their Semitic names, by Semites, it must 
 indeed be evident at once how large must be the share of 
 Semitism in the origin of modern civilization. Semite arts 
 and sciences, gods and inhabitants, were grafted upon Indo- 
 Germanic strata, and the peculiarly happy union of the two 
 principal elements of culture produced the vast glory of the 
 antique. He then traced the figures of our own alphabet 
 (the very name of which but denotes the first two Semitic 
 letters) through the dark stages of Etruscan, Old-Italic, Old- 
 Hellenic, &c, back to the rude scrawls of pre-historic Phoeni- 
 cian stonecutters; and further, our own mode of writing 
 
 * From the ' Atkenaaum,' No. 2022, July 28, 1866. Re-printed by permission.
 
 154 NOTES OF A LECTUEE 
 
 from left to right, through the boustrophedon, or writing 
 both ways, as the ox ploughs, to the primitive manner of 
 writing from right to left, in Semitic languages, and as those 
 Eastern nations that have adopted the Arabic character still 
 do. There was, Mr. Deutsch said, a strange kind of fascina- 
 tion connected with that peculiar study ; it was, to a certain 
 extent, like following the forms of the characters drawn by 
 the hand of some great man, or some one peculiarly dear to 
 us, from the stage of their full development and vigour to 
 the first childish scribbles, through all the phases of inter- 
 vening years with their many events. We should, probably, 
 find them always different, yet always alike in their broad 
 outline. The wide vista displayed to us by a retrospective 
 glance at all the tribes and idioms that made use of this 
 alphabet, which suddenly, as it were, found itself called upon, 
 poor and vowelless as it was, to serve them all to its best 
 abilities, is amazing. No less the extraordinary adaptability 
 it proved in this emergency, and the infinite variety of 
 shapes it subsequently had to assume, according to time 
 and clime. These and a crowd of other speculations lifted 
 the discipline which led to them almost out of the humble 
 sphere of a philological handmaiden to that of a mistress of 
 an immense domain ; not only yielding much solid, substan- 
 tial produce in the way of scientific results, but also giving 
 full sway to those larger and deeper thoughts of the uni- 
 versal solidarity of humanity, which almost touch the realms 
 of poetry. 
 
 Semitism, in its earliest and most widespread influence upon 
 Europe, is chiefly represented by the Phoenicians. To their 
 insignificant country alone it was given to do what neither 
 Egypt nor Assyria, with all their perfection of industry and 
 art, were able to do, viz. to supply the link between the 
 East and the West. Communicating, by Arabia and the 
 Persian Gulf, with India and the coast of Africa towards 
 the Equator, and on the north, along the Euxine, with the 
 borders of Scythia, beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, with 
 Britannia, if not with the Baltic, they introduced the ele- 
 ments of culture to the remotest ends of the earth ; every-
 
 ON SEMITIC PALEOGRAPHY. 155 
 
 where planting colonies, erecting temples, and laying the 
 foundations for a more humane life than the aborigines in 
 most of those far-off lands had ever dreamt of. An outline 
 of Phoenician commerce, Mr. Deutsch said, would comprise 
 almost every conceivable object of home or foreign growth, 
 or manufacture ; but of Phoenician Art, — " in gold and silver, 
 in brass and iron, in purple and in blue, in stone and in 
 timber, in fine linen and precious stones," — infinitely little 
 has survived ; and, touching on Phoenician religion, — a sym- 
 bolical worship of natural phenomena, of abstract ideas, and 
 of allegories and special Numina, — the complete identity 
 of many deities thus created with classical deities was dwelt 
 upon. A sketch of Phoenician literature, which must have 
 been most extensive, and completely in accordance with 
 their high state of cultivation and refinement, was then 
 given. This literature consisted, first, of a vast number of 
 theological, or rather theogonical works, whose authors were 
 reputed to be the gods themselves, and which were only ac- 
 cessible to the priests or to those initiated in the mysteries. 
 From the allegorical explanation of these writings sprang a 
 vast cosmogony, insignificant fragments of which only have 
 come down to us, mutilated and misinterpreted by their 
 Greek reporters. Next to this sacred literature stands their 
 didactic poetry, somewhat related to the Orphic. We further 
 know of their erotic works, of works on history, geography,, 
 navigation, agriculture, — in short, of almost every modern 
 branch of science and belles-lettres. 
 
 But all this wealth of literature has perished, and the 
 scanty extracts that may have survived in foreign literatures 
 cannot be looked upon as really authentic. For genuine 
 and unadulterated " literature " we must look to the original 
 monuments themselves ; to inscriptions on coins and weights, 
 on votive tablets, on sacrificial stones, on tombstones, and 
 on sarcophagi. Broken utterances, faintest echoes though 
 they be, out of them there might perhaps be reconstructed 
 more of the life of that wonderful nation, that had so many 
 things in common with the English, than has hitherto been 
 dreamt of.
 
 156 NOTES OF A LECTURE 
 
 Before proceeding to speak of these monuments them- 
 selves, and principally of those most recently excavated, Mr. 
 Deutsch alluded to a notion which seems to be still abroad, 
 that the Phoenician, being a lost language, which is only 
 now being recovered by degrees, offered the same amount of 
 uncertainty in some of its decipherings as hieroglyphics, 
 cuneiforms, &c, were supposed still to offer. The only 
 difficulties that present themselves to the Phoenician de- 
 cipherer consist either in the newness of terms met, which 
 do not offer any Semitic analogies ; or in their peculiar 
 orthographical or grammatical forms ; or, finally, in the 
 similar shapes some of the characters (B, D and R prin- 
 cipally) exhibit. But here, again, the difficulty is soon 
 solved by the context; almost with the same ease with 
 which the vowels are supplied in any Semitic language, or 
 the sometimes missing diacritical points in any of the 
 idioms written in Arabic characters. 
 
 Mr. Deutsch next enumerated the most important recent 
 discoveries on the soil of Phoenicia (Sidon) and her nume- 
 rous colonies, first giving an outline of the history of Phoe- 
 nician investigation in Europe. Phoenician finds have been 
 very frequent of late years. While up to the middle of the 
 last century hardly anything was known of the existence 
 of Phoenician inscriptions, there is scarcely a museum in 
 Europe now which does not boast of one or two lapidary or 
 numismatic monuments, that have to tell some tale or other 
 in the aboriginal tongue of Canaan. Since Pococke's dis- 
 covery of thirty-one inscriptions on the site of ancient Citium, 
 Malta, Sardinia, Carthage, Algiers, Tripoli, Athens, Mar- 
 seilles, and a host of other places, have given up a number 
 of these eloquent contributions to the history of the Semites 
 who once dwelt upon these spots. The most extensive find 
 lately made consists of nearly a hundred inscriptions, ex- 
 cavated on the site of ancient Carthage, — all votive tablets, 
 with but two exceptions. One of these exceptions is a 
 precious sacrificial tariff, which complements in the happiest 
 way a similar sacred document, found some years ago at 
 Marseilles. The other is probably a tombstone, erected by a
 
 ON SEMITIC PALAEOGRAPHY. 157 
 
 father to his son. Another highly interesting monument 
 ■was excavated about 1863 in Sardinia, and consists of the 
 base of an altar, inscribed with a trilingual (Latin-Greek- 
 Phoenician) legend. A comparison of these three transla? 
 tions, or rather paraphrases, among themselves, leads to 
 most interesting results in many branches of Greek, Komair, 
 and Phoenician antiquities, and chiefly in comparative 
 hierology ; while the Phoenician inscription itself, the 
 largest of the three, is perhaps one of the most curious 
 ever discovered, yielding a number of new linguistic, mytho- 
 logical and orthographical items. After dwelling upon other 
 bilingual, Assyro-Phcenician, Graeco-Phoenician, &c, rem- 
 nants, and upon the excavations by recent French explorers 
 and their results, Mr. Deutsch turned to the Himyaritic- 
 inscriptions, lately embodied in the collections of the British 
 Museum, consisting of votive bronze tablets found in South 
 Arabia, and couched in a long-lost idiom, the nearest ap- 
 proach to which is traced in the present Amharic : allied to 
 Ethiopic and Hebrew. The numerous Hebrew inscriptions 
 which have of late been brought to light, the tombstones 
 from Aden (with several Himyaritic Alephs), the many 
 hundreds of tombstones copied in various parts of the- 
 Crimea, some of which bore very remote dates indeed, the 
 inscription on the " Tomb of the Kings," with its double 
 (Syriac and Hebrew) characters, the family vault of the 
 " Bene Chezir," indicated by a Hebrew inscription in archaic 
 square characters on the " Tomb of St. James," with liga- 
 tures such as were only found on the so-called "Chaldeo- 
 Egyptian " Papyri, and the other minor epigraphs discovered 
 by Kenan, De Saulcy, De Vogue, and others, in their various 
 exploratory tours in the Holy Land, were briefly explained. 
 Finally, Mr. Deutsch described the photographs with Hebrew 
 and Samaritan inscriptions (see Athenxum, No. 2018), con- 
 sisting chiefly of representations of the famous Samaritan 
 Scroll, inscriptions on synagogues in Galilee, and the pro- 
 bably most ancient Samaritan epigraph on a stone immured 
 in a wall of a mosque near Nablus, — the reading of which he 
 has been able fully to restore, — which were brought home
 
 158 LECTURE ON SEMITIC PALEOGRAPHY 
 
 by the first expedition set on foot by the Exploration Fund. 
 From the future activity of this association Mr. Deutsch 
 expected valuable results also for those sciences which had 
 formed the theme of his paper. 
 
 Mr. Deutsch concluded by briefly recapitulating the 
 various points of interest connected with the pursuit of these 
 studies, and the large gain derived from them for the varied 
 disciplines of human knowledge. Semitic Palaeography and 
 Epigraphy supplied one of the strongest links in that chain 
 which binds the remotest ages to our own; and visibly 
 represent, as it were, the undying continuity and solidarity 
 of civilized humanity. 

 
 ( 159 ) 
 
 
 VI. 
 
 NOTES OF THREE LECTURES ON 
 
 SEMITIC CULTURE. 1 
 
 Mat 29, 1869. 
 
 Mr. Deutsch alluded first to his recent but hurried journey 
 through the lands of Shem, and described with much vivid- 
 ness the ancient cities of Jerusalem, Damascus, Tyre and 
 Sidon, now in sadness, but yet full of intensity of life and 
 beauty : and spoke of the touching sight of the faces, with 
 their thousand years of woe written in them, that lean against 
 the wailing-place on the walls of Jerusalem. He then 
 glanced very briefly at the intellectual work achieved by the 
 nations conventionally called Shemites, and the influence 
 exercised by them upon the life and thought of the ancient 
 and modern world. The term, vaguely applied as it is to 
 Assyrians, Chaldeans, Babylonians, Syrians, Ethiopians, 
 Phoenicians, Hebrews, Arabs, and other kindred races, was, 
 he said, an acknowledged misnomer, embracing certain 
 descendants of Ham, such as the Phoenicians and Ethiopians, 
 and excluding others, descendants of Shem, such as Elamites, 
 Assyrians, and Babylonians, as enumerated in the genea- 
 logical table in Genesis. These peoples have ever been 
 grouped together as speaking what were called the Oriental 
 tongues; but at the end of the last century, the gigantic 
 linguistic discoveries in the realms of Eastern philology — 
 notably of Sanskrit and Zend — imperiously called for some 
 clear and specific name to distinguish them from the Aryan 
 or Sanskrit-speaking peoples. To each and every term some 
 objection was raised, until the one that was on all hands 
 
 1 Delivered at the Royal Institution, Albemarle Street.
 
 160 NOTES OF THREE LECTURES 
 
 allowed to be utterly and hopelessly wrong, the term Semitic, 
 was unanimously received, and has been perpetuated to this 
 day. All these, and particularly the Phoenicians, Hebrews, 
 and Arabs, exhibit some most striking common features. 
 Apart from their languages, whicli are identical as to funda- 
 mental elements and structure, there are found among them 
 all certain traits of character, partly traceable to the very 
 nature of the Semitic homesteads ; such as pliability com- 
 bined with iron fixedness of purpose, depth and force, yearn- 
 ing for dreamy ease, together with the capacity for hardest 
 work, and the love of abstract thought. But of all their 
 gifts the one that has told most upon humanity, and left 
 upon it their impress for all times to come, touching upon 
 its highest problems and fixing its noblest aims, is that to 
 them, to the Shemites alone, we owe our spiritual conception 
 of the Deity — monotheism. No Aryan, however elevated in 
 mind, could have formed that idea of God which would seem 
 to have been innate in the Semitic mind. Yet so far from 
 this conception arising from an "instinct," as has been 
 asserted, it is the product of a series of reflections, which, 
 clad in legendary garb, still form one of the favourite topics 
 of Semitic folk-lore. Yet, paradoxical though it may seem, 
 this "instinct " did not prevent the Shemites, with one excep- 
 tion, from being " idolaters." And this one exception, the 
 Jews, did not really cease to be idolaters until all the horrors 
 of fire and sword, of war, exile, and the utter blotting out of 
 political existence, had come upon them : punishments all of 
 which are ascribed to this very deviation from monotheism. 
 And yet a sharp distinction is visible between, for instance, 
 the Indo-Germanic and the Semitic mythology, or rather 
 conception of the Cosmos and its ruling spirits. There never 
 was a real division of powers in the Semitic system, notwith- 
 standing its apparent Dualism. Pantheism in the Greek 
 sense is utterly unknown to the Shemites. Nature is 
 nothing but that which has been begotten, and is ruled 
 absolutely by the one Great Absolute Power. And only in 
 the more or less abstract conception of this one Power are 
 found what differences there do exist in the Semitic creeds 
 in their respective stages. There is but one name for this
 
 ON SEMITIC CULTURE. 161 
 
 Being: Baal, El, Elohini, Allah, Elyon, Astarte-Tanis — 
 meaning one and all of them, Might, Almighty, Omnipotent, 
 the Divine Judge — while Jehovah denotes the mercy which 
 revokes and tears up the dread decree before it is carried into 
 execution. Abraham and his descendants were the first 
 aj)ostles of conscious and absolute monotheism. 
 
 Semitic arts and sciences, though of the strongest possible 
 influence upon Europe, always remained inferior — or pro- 
 portionately less developed — to those of the West, which 
 they had to a certain extent begotten ; while their literature 
 in some instances stands absolutely foremost, and rules 
 supreme to this day. The Shemites, from some strange 
 idiosyncrasy, perpetuated by religious ordinances, abhorred, 
 all of them, at certain stages, the making visible pictures 
 of things they revered, loved, worshipped. And all the 
 intensity of their most intense souls, their loves and their 
 yearnings, took refuge in the realms of imagination. The 
 greatest charm of these tales and songs consists just in this, 
 that, however unearthly and ethereal are the beings intro- 
 duced, they are always most thoroughly human, thus appeal- 
 ing to our best and most catholic sympathies. The great 
 storehouse, the Midrash, teems with gems that have been 
 scattered broadcast over not merely the whole Jewish and 
 Mohammedan, but over also the classical and Christian 
 world, together with all those other elements of civilisation 
 and refinement which the Shemites never ceased to impart 
 to our Western lands. A passing allusion was here made to 
 the strange, mysterious instinct, so to say, that has ever and 
 will ever draw both peoples and individuals to the Semitic 
 East, to seek some balm, or comfort, or light. The Crusades 
 were nothing more nor less than the outcome of one of these 
 wild yearnings eastwards that had spread over Europe ; and 
 the only tangible results from them were certain beautiful 
 Saga-cycles, which we now call mediaeval, which will be said 
 and sung as long as humanity endures. He then dwelt upon 
 the characteristics of the Shemitic language, where the con- 
 sonants are everything aud the vowels nothing : the poverty 
 of flexion and crudeness of syntax, as compared with the 
 Indo-Germanic languages. 
 
 M
 
 162 NOTES OF THREE LECTURES 
 
 Turning to the principal nations, mentioned individually, 
 Mr. Deutsch first drew a sketch of Babylonian culture, such 
 as it is revealed, however fragmentarily, by the semi-fabulous 
 records said to be written by Berosus, the priest of Bel, and 
 by such surviving ruins as the "Tower of Babel " with their 
 cuneiform records, and pointed out how strong had been its 
 influence upon those Shemites who lived in the full light 
 of history. He touched upon the creed and the concomitant 
 tenets and rites of the Babylonians, essentially a worship 
 of the Hosts of Heaven, much inveighed against by the 
 Prophets. Their chief worship was of Baal, Bel, the Sun, 
 and of Mylitta or Astarte, the moon, the female principle : 
 the planets, the stars, birds, fishes, &c. The result of this 
 devotion to supernatural as well as natural objects was three- 
 fold ; it led to astrology, astronomy, and to the creation and 
 maintenance of a kalendar of singular accuracy. The second 
 of these was utilized by the seafaring Phoenicians. 
 
 The Phoenicians form, in some respects, the most important 
 fraction of the whole group of antique nations, notwithstand- 
 ing that they sprung from the most obscure and insignificant 
 families : this fraction when settled, was constantly exposed 
 to inroads by new tribes, was utterly conquered and sub- 
 jected by utter strangers when it had taken a great place 
 among nations, and yet by industry, by perseverance, by 
 acuteness of intellect, by unscrupulousness and want of faith, 
 by adaptability and pliability when necessary, and dogged 
 defiance at other times, by total disregard of the rights of the 
 weaker, they obtained the foremost place in the history of 
 their times, and the highest reputation not only for the 
 things they did, but for many that they did not. They were 
 the first systematic traders, the first miners and metallur- 
 gists, the greatest inventors (if we may apply such a term to 
 those who kept an ever-watchful look-out for the inventions 
 of others and immediately applied them to themselves with 
 some grand improvements on the original idea) ; they were 
 the boldest mariners, the greatest colonizers, who at one 
 time held not only the gorgeous East but the whole of the 
 then half-civilized West in fee — who could boast of a form 
 of government approaching to constitutionalism ; who of all 

 
 ON SEMITIC CULTUEE. 163 
 
 nations of their time stood highest in practical arts and 
 sciences, and into whose laps there flowed an unceasing 
 stream of the world's entire riches, until the day came when 
 they began to care for nothing else, and the enjoyment of 
 material comforts and luxuries took the place of the thirst 
 for and search after knowledge. Their piratical prowess 
 and daring was undermined; their colonies, grown strong 
 enough to stand alone, fell away from them, some after a 
 hard fight, others in mutual agreement or silently : and the 
 nations, in whose estimation and fear they had held the first 
 place and been tributary to them, disdained them, ignored 
 them, and finally struck them utterly out of the list of 
 nations, till they dwindled away miserably, a warning to 
 all who should come after them. 
 
 Of their powers of adaptation, we may take, for example, 
 their adoption of the Babylonian system of weights and 
 measures, which they transmitted through the Greeks to 
 Europe ; while in the matter of writing, they were in no 
 sense the originators of the alphabet which we use to this 
 day, for this they developed, or rather simplified, out of the 
 so-called cuneiforms — an originally hieroglyphical or mono- 
 grammic kind of writing, which, by degrees, begot the most 
 complicated systems, and still offers not inconsiderable diffi- 
 culties ; but their improvements and modifications of which 
 have been spread over the whole world. 
 
 With all their defects, few, if any people, have left behind 
 them so many impressions of their greatness, or, indeed, so 
 remarkable a name. Thus we find the Phoenicians steerino- 
 by the Pole-star — a discovery of the highest moment in 
 Navigation — while the Greeks still clung to Ursa Major; 
 and they sent out an expedition in the time of Necho which 
 lasted three years, but which rounded the Cape at least 2000 
 years before Vasco da Gama. 
 
 Of their form of government we have few details, but it is 
 certain that they practised or allowed an amount of freedom 
 unknown among the nations around their earliest homes or 
 among whom they settled as colonists ; and there can be no 
 doubt that on the whole their rule was beneficial and gener- 
 al 2
 
 16-4 NOTES OF THREE LECTURES 
 
 ally humane: the Greeks and Bomans were indebted to> 
 them immeasurably, and we ourselves not a little. About 
 the origin of their name there has been considerable doubt : 
 some deriving it from phoinix, the date-palm, others con- 
 necting it directly with the legend of Cadmus, literally the 
 " man from the East," who appears as their leader from 
 Phoenicia to Europe. 
 
 The religion of the Phoenicians was a Pantheistic worship 
 of Nature. No nation of antiquity, perhaps, possessed a more 
 endless pandemonium than they did; a circumstance easily 
 explained by their peculiar position and relations. They 
 consisted originally of a variety of tribes, each of whom had 
 their own special deities, and although the supreme Numenor, 
 the principle of their chief deity, was probably the same with 
 both, those Phoenicians who dwelt in the north had different 
 names and attributes in some respects for their gods from 
 those who dwelt in the south. Their one peculiarity is that 
 they divided their conception of the divine essence more 
 politically, or geographically, than philosophically. It was 
 the local sanctuaries no less than the peculiar attributes that 
 distinguish the different Baalim as to their names. Besides 
 the supreme God of the whole country, there is Baal-Zur, 
 Baal-Zidon, Baal-Hermon, &c, denoting so many geogra- 
 phical localities. Their Melkart is not a special deity, but 
 merely means the king of the special city of that particular 
 colony. Baal simply means lord, while Moloch means 
 sacrifice. Some curious classical legends are clearly of Phoe- 
 nician origin, e. g. that of the Minotaur or Moloch-worship 
 in Crete ; while one of their ancient festivals, that of the 
 " wedding of the land and sea," is still performed every year 
 at modern Tyre. The Phoenician form of government, with 
 its king-high-priest, its senate and commons, resembled very 
 closely modern constitutionalism : thus allowing the fullest 
 development of industry and artistic manufactures — manu- 
 factures such as we meet with under their original Phoeniko- 
 Hebrew names in the Homeric poems. They were the in- 
 ventors of the manufacture of glass and of vitreous pastes ; 
 and, for many centuries, after their name had been forgotten 
 in their own land, ships, which we may well call Phoenician,
 
 ON SEMITIC CULTURE. 165 
 
 conveyed their cargoes of sand from Mount Cannel to the 
 glass-factories of mediaeval Venice. In mining they excelled, 
 the Lebanon supplying them with inexhaustible stores of iron 
 ore : the realistic description of mining in the Book of Job 
 may be remembered. Abundant remains are found of their 
 engravings on copper and gems : while the mighty blocks of 
 the recently excavated wall of the Temple at Jerusalem — 
 doubtless the labour of Solomon by the hands of Hiram's 
 men — the still-remaining ruins of Tyre and Aradus, and 
 probably of Tiryns and Mykenae, attest what they did in 
 their days of grandeur and almost unlimited power. 
 
 The many-sided development of Phoenician literature, its 
 science and its belles-lettres, its theology and its philosophy, 
 whereof but very few and suspicious fragments survive, was 
 sketched, and the only real and genuine utterances that do 
 exist in lapidary inscriptions were specially enumerated. 
 These — commencing with the inscriptions discovered at 
 Citium by Pococke about a century ago, down to the most 
 recent, in all about 150 — are mostly votive or dedicatory to 
 some god or goddess ; there are, however, four remarkable 
 exceptions : first, the two levitical or priestly tariffs, indi- 
 cating the sum and the portions of the sacrifice belonging 
 to the ministering functionaries, the one of which is in 
 Marseilles, the other in the British Museum ; further, the 
 celebrated Ashmunazar tomb in the Louvre; and the tri- 
 lingual (Phoeniko-Greek-Latin) inscription of the altar found 
 in Sardinia, now in the museum at Turin ; the deciphering 
 of these writings was shown to rest on as firm a basis as 
 that of any Greek or Koman or English lapidary document. 
 Tyre and Sidon, in their present condition, were then 
 described. 
 
 June 5. 
 
 The second lecture was devoted to the work of the most 
 important representative branch of that family of nations 
 whom we call Shemitic — a people of many fates, of manv 
 names. The Bible calls them " the people of God ; " 
 Mohammed, the " people of the Book ; " Hegel calls them 
 " the people of the Geist ; " we know them by the terms
 
 166 NOTES OF THREE LECTURES 
 
 Hebrews, Israelites, or Jews, — terms the indiscriminate use 
 of which Mr. Deutsch strongly deprecated, inasmuch as these 
 terms formed distinct landmarks in the history of the people 
 under consideration. From the dark beginnings of the 
 Mesopotamian times down to the Egyptian bondage the 
 word Hebrew — derived from Ibri, meaning from the other 
 side of the Euphrates, or from Eber the great-grandson of 
 Shem — points to that idyllic period, the records of which 
 are more or less those of a family only. With the awak- 
 ening of self-consciousness and nationality they assume the 
 victory-boding and mysterious name of Israel, as the children 
 of him who obtained it after the night-long struggle at 
 Penuel ; and from the time of Babylon and the Great Dis- 
 persion they are Jews (Yehudin), or descendants of Judah. 
 The history of this last period is unparalleled in the annals 
 of Humanity. It is among them that the Divine Oneness 
 first grew into a dogma, absolute, uncompromising. And 
 speaking of the period between the immigration from 
 Mesopotamia and the emigration to Egypt, Mr. Deutsch 
 pointed out the deeper signification of this emigration than 
 has been usually recognized, since he considered that it 
 represents the course of education by which this people has 
 ever been systematically brought into contact with other 
 nations at the very time of the highest development of the 
 latter; that Egypt, to which they went as rude shepherds 
 and huntsmen from the idyllic, simple, twilight life at 
 home, was Egypt at the most brilliant stage, perhaps, of its 
 culture, as proved by the literature, the arts and the sciences 
 of the time. Yet, at this very period, it is to be remembered, 
 the supreme unity of the Godhead was taught in Egypt to 
 the initiated, although to the uninitiated it was veiled in a 
 cloud of mystery, ceremony, and symbol. Nor are the points 
 of contact between the Egyptian and the Mosaic ritual few. 
 In the scrolls entombed with the dead in those days the 
 name of God is never mentioned save in the guise of the 
 phrase Nuk-pu-nuk, which means / am that I am. The 
 Mosaic constitution, political and religious, was explained, 
 as well as the literature begotten at different stages, re- 
 flecting the people's mental state from the time of Joshua
 
 ON SEMITIC CULTURE. 167 
 
 to that of the establishment of monarchy and the contem- 
 poraneous elevation of priestly power and the spread of 
 education. Yet even now they developed little or nothing 
 of the arts and sciences : for these they were dependent upon 
 other nations, chiefly the Phoenicians, to whom they owe 
 most of their commerce. It was with them that they under- 
 took that famous voyage of discovery from which they 
 brought back those strange things, with their purely Sans- 
 krit names, recorded in the Bible. One occupation only 
 seems to have been after their own heart, the tilling of the 
 soil. 
 
 The fall of the monarchies and the captivity, chiefly that 
 of Babylon, begins the emphatically Jewish period, which 
 is not ended yet. The story of the Exile remains still to be 
 written, but it will be long before it is accomplished. It is 
 one of the most momentous and problematic of all times. 
 Glimpses are revealed to us of the state of culture of Persia 
 and Babylonia at that period ; but never until the contem- 
 porary literature is fully known will the relation between 
 the Vedas and the Avesta, Zoroastrianism and the Talmud, 
 be revealed. The analogies between the Persian creed of 
 the time and the Judaism of the captives is so striking that 
 we may fairly doubt which have most influenced the other ; 
 we only see clearly the extraordinary and radical change 
 which, within the space of a few generations, came over the 
 exiles under the influence of the civilization and religion of 
 Persia. 
 
 To the Dispersion, which began with Babylon and lasts to 
 this hour, is principally due that cosmopolitan element in 
 Judaism which has added so vastly to its own strength and 
 durability, and even, geographically, to the wonderfully 
 rapid spread of Christianity in its beginnings. To this 
 Babylonian exile must be traced some of the most important 
 institutions of the Synagogue. In this same period all those 
 fierce yearnings for a Deliverer, an Anointed, a Messiah — 
 one of the highest and most ideal conceptions of Humanity 
 — found their loudest and most glowing utterance. Then 
 came also all the great basis of the further development of 
 Judaism, the oral Law, which, under the guise of heaping
 
 168 NOTES OF THREE LECTURES 
 
 ordinance upon ordinance, in reality, perhaps unconsciously, 
 aimed at the highest mental liberty, the emancipation of the 
 spirit from the letter. They returned to Judrca as brands 
 plucked from the burning : they carried with them their 
 writings, few and scanty in number, embodying their history 
 and their poetry, their law and their legends, saved out of 
 a vast multitude of writings which perished irredeemably, 
 and is now only known to us in faint snatches and echoes. 
 The work of re-organization was wrought by the " Men of the 
 Great Synagogue " : the collection of the Canon and the insti- 
 tution of the Targums, or translations, followed. In these 
 popular Aramaic translations they were anxious to avoid all 
 and everything that could mislead and puzzle even the least- 
 prepared member of the community ; all anthropomorphisms 
 and things transcendentally or mysteriously worded in the 
 Bible, or apt to give offence, were either omitted or para- 
 phrased. The position of the Meturgeman, or interpreta- 
 tions, and the growth of Targumic literature, its reputed 
 authors, and its influence upon all later versions, — were 
 illustrated by numerous examples. Then came the Masorab, 
 or diplomatic preservation of the Sacred Text, whose germs 
 were also laid in those days, chiefly to check a too free 
 handling of the Scriptural contents. Much was said of the 
 Talmud, of its origin and growth, of its manner of teaching 
 and preaching, its national and its foreign elements, and 
 the influence these things have exercised upon Christianity 
 and Mohammedanism, the latter of which grew out of Judaism 
 at the moment when the great epoch of Talmudical develop- 
 ment had been violently brought to an end. The worship in 
 the Synagogue, with the voluntary prayers current at the 
 time, when the simple supplications of old no longer satisfied 
 the yearnings of the people, were explained ; and it was 
 shown how the mental progress or decay of the different 
 periods w r ere embodied in the enormous mass of liturgies in 
 which the Jews delighted, every country and city composing 
 their own. The rise of Mohammedanism, and the relation 
 between Muslims and Jews, gave birth to one of the most 
 brilliant epochs in Hebrew literature under the Moorish rule : 
 the Jews and the Spanish- Arabs emulating each other in
 
 ON SEMITIC CULTURE. 169 
 
 the renewal of Greek science. The new-born Arabs, carry- 
 ing everything before them, and appropriating to themselves 
 the learning of all the peoples they conquered in the East 
 and West, made Jewish literature what it now is, kaleido- 
 scopic, cosmopolitan. The period which commenced with 
 Maimonides (whose great work, founded upon the broad 
 principle that the Bible must be expounded in accordance 
 with rational conclusions, became the text-book of the 
 mediaeval universities), and which ended with Moses Mendels- 
 sohn, was one less of original production than of scholastic, 
 theologic, exegetic philosophy, overshadowed to a great 
 extent by baneful mystic tendencies. But during this period 
 the art of printing was invented ; and while bigotry called 
 it the Black Art and the work of the Devil, the Jews hailed 
 it with rapture, and called it "a holy labour"; Jewish print- 
 ing-presses at once sprung up throughout Europe. The new 
 epoch, however, which commenced with Mendelssohn, is not 
 closed yet. The once proscribed and detested Jews have 
 ever since his day taken a prominent place in the public 
 and scientific life of Europe, in art, in literature, in finance, 
 in politics ; they have been in truth the vanguard and 
 missionaries of civilization. And their destiny is not yet 
 fulfilled. 
 
 June 12. 
 
 This Lecture was devoted to the third representative 
 branch of the Shemites, the Arabs. The Phoenicians came 
 to Europe as traders : the Jews as fugitives : or captives, the 
 Arabs entered it as conquerors. They inaugurated a reign of 
 science, of poetry, of learning, of culture, such as had not 
 been seen since the golden days of Hellas : a culture which 
 has left its traces upon Europe to this day, and which then 
 shone, the only light in utter darkness, over a people bril- 
 liant in chivalry and song, full of noble courtesy and of simple 
 piety. The Jews furthered the work of catholic human 
 •culture : the Arabs inaugurated modern science. The day 
 of the fall of Granada was one of the saddest days in history. 
 The origin of the primitive Arabs is a matter of the pro-
 
 170 NOTES OF THREE LECTURES 
 
 foundest obscurity — an obscurity both natural and artificial, 
 since with the commencement of Mohaniniedanisni all that 
 had been was declared unworthy of record, and its memorials 
 were wilfully destroyed ; thus the "time of ignorance," as that 
 whole previous period was called, became, indeed, a true desig- 
 nation. Enough, however, remains to prove that Arab culture 
 stood in high renown as early as the golden period of Hebrew 
 literature ; no higher praise could be bestowed upon the 
 wisdom of Solomon than that it was like unto the wisdom of 
 the Arabs. The Queen of Sheba was an Arab, Job's friends 
 were Arabs, and many other instances: while the period 
 shortly before Mohammed was certainly one of the most 
 brilliant in Arabic literature, emphatically as regards poetry, 
 though the tale of the Moallakat, as poems " suspended " (in 
 the Kaaba), must be rejected. 
 
 The double aspect of the Deity which was noticed before 
 as a general feature of early Semitic creeds is found among 
 the heathen Arabs as Nur Allah — God's light — and Alilat 
 the female El, corresponding to the Baal-faced Tanis or 
 Astoreth of the Phoenicians. There are vague traces of a 
 tree and stone worship ; the veneration of certain personified 
 divine attributes, and some singular fetishes, with good and 
 evil demons, made up the early Arab religion, which Mo- 
 hammed came to overthrow, putting Judaism, more or less 
 Arabicized, in its stead. Yet long before Mohammed these 
 things were, even by the herd, recognised as mere inter- 
 mediators with the great Allah, and their worship would 
 have been abrogated long before if strong interests of another 
 kind had not been attached to their sanctuaries. Besides 
 astrological, genealogical, and dream lore, poetry formed the 
 chief part of ante-Mohanimedan literature; and what little 
 has come down of the latter almost outshines what has come 
 later. The Kasida, the favourite poetical form, was devoted 
 to love, valour, and wisdom, its imagery being derived from 
 the desert solitudes around and the starry skies above. In 
 the midst of a nation thus gifted and prepared, but widely 
 scattered, and waiting, as it were, for some rallying-point, 
 Mohammed was born. His early history is surrounded by a 
 

 
 ON SEMITIC CULTURE. 171 
 
 legend-cycle, yet the difficulties of arriving at a rational 
 account are not so great as in other cases ; for the history of 
 Islam requires only the discarding certain items, such as his 
 travels in Syria, the monk Sergius, and the rest ; because the 
 notion of the influence of Christianity chiefly rests on these. 
 But the influence of Christianity upon this new religion,. 
 " the Keligion of Abraham," as Mohammed called it, is as 
 scanty as that of heathenism. Indeed, the basis of dogmatic 
 Christianity, viz. the Sonship of Christ, Mohammed in- 
 veighed against early and late. 
 
 It was Judaism, as developed under the influence of the 
 oral law, which is principally represented in the Koran, not 
 merely with regard to certain rabbinical terms, implying the 
 most important dogmas and doctrines of Judaism, but even 
 some of the most minute Talmudical ordinances are bodily 
 transferred to the new code. The explanation of this pheno- 
 menon is found not in isolated personal communications, but 
 in the general position of the Jews of Arabia, who repre- 
 sented the educated and most influential part of the com- 
 munity, and who had long prepared the way for the intro- 
 duction of that religion of Abraham which Mohammed came 
 to preach to his kin. Mr. Deutsch described the nature of 
 the new revelation and the emphatic manner in which 
 Mohammed protested against the idea that he was able to 
 work miracles, adding that what were reported (such as the 
 night journey) were declared to be visions. The contents of 
 the Koran, the fundamental code of Islamism, were next 
 considered; with the redaction and the masoretic labours 
 bestowed upon it, as well as the style, varying with the 
 periods of the Prophet's life — its whole tone and tenour, and 
 the almost demoniacal influence the book has exercised since 
 its appearance. The two chief divisions of Islam, the practical 
 and the dogmatical, were then discussed; and the general 
 spirit of the religion, as practised by the Koran, not as- 
 explained by some later commentators and exegetics, was 
 broadly characterised as one of justice, truth, and mercy. 
 
 The Sunnah or oral traditions were then explained, and 
 among the numerous sects which sprang up within Moham-
 
 172 THREE LECTURES ON SEMITIC CULTURE. 
 
 medanism, the Mutazilites, the Sincere Brethren, the Isrnailis, 
 were singled out, and their bold speculations ending in the 
 absolute discarding of all Revelation and Supranaturalisni, 
 were dwelt upon. Some of the secret fundamental rules of 
 their respective organizations and their missionary canons, 
 were things of no small influence upon mediaeval and modern 
 rationalism, producing a vast development of religious 
 thought; they offer the best proof against the common 
 assumption that Islam is identical with mental and religious 
 petrifaction. Among the many points often repeated without 
 being warranted by facts, is the absolute fallacy of the notion 
 that Fatalism is a doctrine of the Koran : it teaches the very 
 contrary doctrine. Mohammed's whole system is one of faith 
 built on hope and fear. Nor did the word Islam originally be- 
 token that absolute and blind submission which it afterwards 
 came to mean, but rather the being at peace and living in 
 accordance with God's words and commands, leading the life 
 of a righteous man ; in the sense in which the derivatives of 
 the Semitic Salam occur in early Aramaic. 
 
 The Koran for a time seemed to stifle all literature ; it 
 was God's own word, and it was enough. But Arabic lite- 
 rature, quickened by the contact with Greek science and the 
 ■enormous mental activity of the Jews, began to develop anew 
 in Spain, and became encyclopaedic. The one branch in 
 which it now again excelled was poetry ; yet here the old 
 forms, so well suited to the desert, could no longer be used in 
 luxurious city life ; it soon, however, adapted itself to all this, 
 retaining only a vague, undefmable yearning after the infinite 
 •that is strangely beautiful. Its influences upon European 
 literature — Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio — are easily traced ; 
 and not unnaturally, since studious youths flocked from all 
 iparts of the world to the schools and academies of Spain. 
 It is thus that the Arabs, together with the Jews, stand, as 
 it were at the cradle of modern science. Yet there is cer- 
 tainly now a pause, or rather retrogression in the mental 
 life of that great people : its causes will, however, most surely 
 Ve amended, and the Arab Shemite will once more take his 
 share in the ruling of the world's destinies.
 
 ( 173 ) 
 
 VIT. 
 EGYPT, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 3 
 
 Re-published by permission. 
 
 This book is another proof of the vast and wholesome 
 change that is gradually taking place in the learned litera- 
 ture of Germany. Although treating of a most abstruse 
 subject, it is yet not only fit for human reading, but is abso- 
 lutely one of the most interesting works which we have seen 
 for some time. It consists of a series of essays or lectures 
 delivered before a select circle in Berlin, during the last 
 nine years, by Dr. Brugsch, the eminent Egyptologist. On 
 changing his professorial chair at the Prussian University 
 for his new official post at Cairo, he has published these 
 essays as a farewell gift to his friends in Europe. They are 
 divided into two parts, the first of which contains sketches 
 and reminiscences of his journeys on the Nile, through 
 the desert, and in the streets of Cairo. Teeming as these 
 picturesque descriptions are with valuable and interesting 
 remarks, we refrain from dwelling upon them. We prefer to 
 reserve our space for the second part, in which the latest 
 results of hieroglyphic science are put before us in so lucid 
 and fascinating a manner that we are apt to forget at times 
 how enormous were the labours which produced them. 
 
 The first essay of the second part is entitled " An Ancient 
 Egyptian Fairy Tale ; the Oldest Fairy Tale in the World." 
 It is the first German, and altogether the first complete, ver- 
 sion of the celebrated papyrus acquired by Mrs. D'Orbiney 
 in 1852, which is now in the British Museum. Although, 
 
 1 This article appeared in the 
 ' Saturday Keview ' for December 9, 
 1865, and reviewed the following 
 
 work : — ' Aus clem 
 Heinrich Brugsch. 
 Berlin : Grosse. 
 
 Orient.' Von 
 Zwei Theile.
 
 174 EGYPT, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 
 
 Dr. Brugsch says, the text has for years been before the 
 learned world, nothing but extracts from it — of which we 
 gave an account some time ago — have been translated as 
 yet. And he adds quaintly, that this first version is not a 
 philological trick nor altogether an offspring only of his own 
 fancy. " M y humble merit is confined simply and solely to 
 the application to a given text of the rules of hieroglyphical 
 grammar, which in these days have become the common 
 property of science " — a statement of which the followers of 
 Sir G. Cornewall Lewis will do well to make a note. This 
 papyrus dates from the fourteenth century B.C., when Pha- 
 raoh Ramses Miamun, the founder of Pi thorn and Ramses, 
 ruled at Thebes, and literature celebrated its highest 
 triumphs at his brilliant court. Nine pre-eminent savans 
 were attached to the person of this king, the contemporary 
 of Moses. At their head stood, as " Master of the Rolls," a 
 certain Kagabu, unrivalled in elegance of style and diction. 
 It was he, probably, who officiated as Keeper at that vast 
 Library at Thebes of which classical writers speak as having 
 borne the inscription " ^u%^/? larpehv " — somewhat similar 
 to Frederic II.'s inscription over the Royal Library at 
 Berlin, " Nutrimentum Spiritus." This hieroglyphic docu- 
 ment is the only one hitherto known which belongs to the 
 world of fiction. Hymns, exhortations, historical records, 
 accounts of journeys, general essays, eulogies on kings, and 
 bills, form the general staple of that very brittle literature. 
 Written expressly " in usurn Delphini " — namely, for the 
 Crown Prince, Seti Menephta, son of Rameses II. — our 
 papyrus bears the following critical note, or mark of official 
 censorship : — " Found worthy to be wedded to the names of 
 the Pharaonic Scribe Kagabu and the Scribe Hora and the 
 Scribe Meremapu. Its author is the Scribe Annana, the 
 proprietor of this scroll. May the God Toth guard all 
 the words contained in this scroll from destruction ! " In 
 language and manner it resembles most of the productions 
 of its classical period. It is lucid and clear, and though full 
 of poetical fancy, yet simple and unaffected, reminding the 
 reader occasionally of the grand simplicity in word and
 
 EGYPT, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 175 
 
 thought found in Scripture. It further resembles the latter 
 in its occasional monotony and repetitions ; both, however, 
 drawbacks common to nearly all the early documents of 
 different literatures. The tale itself is rather a curious 
 one to be selected for the special reading of a young prince. 
 Its "motive" is the same as in the story of Joseph and 
 Potiphar's wife. The chief persons are~two brothers and the 
 wife of the elder one, who brings a false accusation against 
 her young brother-in-law. The latter saves himself from 
 his brother's wrath, and goes, aided by the Sun-God, through 
 a peculiar transformation. The wife meets her well-deserved 
 fate, and the two brothers are in^the^end restored to each 
 other's esteem and love, and the elder becomes regent of 
 Egypt. Apart from the general literary interest attaching 
 to this relic of more than three thousand years ago — which 
 gains a peculiar significance from the fact that it was first 
 written and read at the very Court of Ramses II. at which 
 Moses was educated — it incidentally reveals so much of the 
 manners and customs, the notionsand'views, of that peculiar 
 era of ancient Egypt, that we cannot be too grateful for its 
 almost miraculous preservation. 
 
 Of more vital interest, however, are those hieroglyphic 
 discoveries which enable us to trace the sojourn of the Israel- 
 ites in Egypt, in its monuments. Almost all recent investi- 
 gators of this subject agree that the time between the immi- 
 gration and the Exodus formed part of one of the most 
 glorious epochs of Pharaonic rule — namely, that of the 
 eighteenth dynasty. For twenty centuries Egyptian sove- 
 reigns had held all the country in undisturbed possession, 
 when suddenly, pushed by the Assyrians, Shemitic hordes 
 broke into the Eastern Delta and seized upon it, gradually 
 extending their dominions so as to make even the kings of 
 Upper Egypt tributary. For more than five hundred years 
 the Egyptians bore the yoke of these foreign conquerors — 
 called in the inscriptions either " Amu," i. e. " shepherds of 
 oxen," or " Aadu," " detested, wicked ones " — whose kings 
 held court at Tanis (Hauar, Avaris) in much prouder style 
 than the Theban monarchs themselves. Who were the
 
 176 EGYPT, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 
 
 gallant and skilful generals who, by a few bold strokes, re- 
 conquered the independence of Egypt, and expelled or 
 utterly subdued the foreign population; is not known. But 
 this reverse to the fortunes of the native Pharaohs happened, 
 we know for certain, during that eighteenth Theban dynasty, 
 and the three centuries that followed form the most flourish- 
 ing period of Egyptian history. Egyptian armies penetrated 
 into Palestine, marched along the royal road by Gaza and 
 Megiddo to the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris, made 
 Babylon and Nineveh tributary, and erected their last vic- 
 torious columns on the borders of Armenia, where, as the 
 hieroglyphic texts have it, Heaven rests on its four pillars, 
 No doubt these conquests in Asia, and the thousands and 
 thousands of Shemitic prisoners whom the conquerors carried 
 home as slaves, were looked upon in the light of reprisals for 
 the long period of Shemitic oppression. Endless are the 
 processions of figures on the gigantic and apparently in- 
 destructible temple walls erected by these wretched Asiatic 
 prisoners, representing them in the act of carrying water to 
 knead the mortar, forming bricks in wooden frames, spread- 
 ing them out to dry in the sun, carrying them to the 
 buildings in the course of erection, and the like ; all this 
 being done under the eye of Egyptian officials, lounging 
 about armed with weighty sticks, while different inscriptions 
 inform us of the nature of the special work done by these 
 " prisoners whom the King has taken, that they might build 
 temples to his gods." 
 
 About the middle of the fifteenth century before our era, 
 there arose a new dynasty, the nineteenth, at the head of 
 which stands Rameses I. It is under the long rule of his 
 grandson, Eameses II., who mounted the throne at about 
 1^00, that we meet with the first monumental hints re- 
 garding the events recorded in Scripture. This Per-aa or 
 Pher-ao — literally "High House" — who reigned sixty-six 
 years, erected, so the hieroglyphical sources tell us, a chain 
 of forts or fortified cities from Pelusium to Heliopolis, of 
 which the two principal ones bore the names of " Rameses " 
 and " Pachtum," our biblical " Pithom " ; both situated in
 
 EGYPT, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 177 
 
 the present Wadi Tuinilat, near the sweet-water canal that 
 joined the Nile with the Red Sea. Papyri of the time of 
 this " Pharaoh of the Exodus " give a glowing description 
 of those new strongholds. In the Papyrus Anastasi (in the 
 British Museum), the scribe Pinebsa reports to his superior, 
 Amenenaput, how very " sweet " and " incomparable " life is 
 in Rameses, how " its plains swarm with people, its fields with 
 birds, and its ponds and canals with fishes ; how the meadows 
 glitter with balmy flowers, the fruits taste like unto honey, 
 and the corn-houses and barns overflow with grain." This 
 official further describes the splendid reception given to the 
 king at his first entry (in the tenth year of his reign) into 
 the new city, and how the people pressed forward to salute 
 u him, great in victory." We even find the very name of 
 the Hebrews recorded in the official reports of the day. A 
 papyrus in the Museum of Leyden contains the following, 
 addressed by the scribe Kauitsir to his superior, the scribe 
 Bakenptah : — 
 
 <( May my Lord find satisfaction in my having complied with the in- 
 struction my Lord gave me, saying, Distribute the rations among the 
 soldiers, and likewise among the Hebrews (Apuru) who carry the stones 
 to the great city of King Rameses-Miamun, the lover of truth ; [and who 
 are] under the orders of the Captain of the police-soldiers, Ameneman. I 
 distribute the food among them monthly, according to the excellent in- 
 structions which my Lord has given me." 
 
 Similar distinct indications of the people and their state of 
 serfdom are found in another Leyden papyrus, and even in 
 the long rock-inscription of Hamamat. Joseph had never 
 been at the court of an Egyptian Pharaoh, but at that of 
 one of those Shemite kings of Avaris-Tanis ; and when, after 
 the expulsion of this foreign dynasty and the quick ex- 
 tinction of the one which overthrew it, Rameses had come 
 to the throne, it was natural enough that " he knew not 
 Joseph." 
 
 The Exodus took place under Menephtes, the successor of 
 that second Rameses in the sixth year of whose reign Moses 
 probably was born. In the twenty-first year of his rule, 
 Rameses had concluded a treaty with the Hittites, the text 
 
 N
 
 178 EGYPT, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 
 
 of which is found cut into a stone-wall at Thebes, and in 
 which occurs the following important passage: — "If the 
 subjects of King Rameses should come to the King of 
 the Hittites, the King of the Hittites is not to receive them, 
 but to force them to return to Barneses the King of Egypt." 
 This sufficiently explains the fear expressed by the biblical 
 Pharaoh, lest the people might " go up from the land." The 
 Shemitic population, subdued and enslaved as they were, 
 had one glowing desire only — to escape from Egypt, and 
 join their brethren at home in their wars against the 
 Pharaohs. 
 
 The name of Moses is now universally recognised to be of 
 Egyptian origin. It is the Mas or Massu of rather frequent 
 occurrence on the monuments, and means " child." A 
 certain connection of Egyptian ideas with the Mosaic legis- 
 lation, its sacrifices, purifications, &c, is also no longer 
 questioned. But there is one most important monumental 
 testimony, which is not sufficiently recognised yet, and 
 which fully proves that to those far-famed Egyptian adepts 
 of priestly wisdom the sublime doctrine of the Unity of the 
 Deity was well known, aud that the manifold forms of 
 the Egyptian Pantheon were nothing but religious masks, so 
 to speak — grotesque allegorical embodiments of that origi- 
 nally pure dogma communicated to the initiated in the 
 Mysteries. And the initiated took their sublime Confession 
 of Faith, inscribed upon a scroll, with them even into the 
 grave. The name of the One God, however, is not men- 
 tioned on it, but is expressed only in the circumlocution, 
 NuJc pu NuJc — "lam he who I am." Who does not instantly 
 remember the awful " I am that 1 am " sounding from amid 
 the flames of the bush ? 
 
 We shall not further pursue these and similar points of 
 high importance touched upon in the essay inscribed " Moses 
 and the Monuments," but turn to a chapter quaintly entitled 
 " What the Stones are Saying." It is the vast and varied 
 number of stone inscriptions found in Egyptian tombs of 
 which Dr. Brunch here treats. He finds the reason for the 
 people dwelling during their lifetime in tents of mud, but
 
 EGYPT, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 179 
 
 erecting everlasting monuments for their corpses, in their 
 firm conviction of the existence of another, an everlasting, 
 world, to which this present one is merely the entrance-hall. 
 While a general inscription on the walls of these tombs 
 uniformly exhorts the living to praise the Deity gladly, to 
 leave all earthly things behind when the parting moment 
 arrives, and to pray for the dead, there are others upholding 
 most characteristically the advantages and the high rank 
 possessed by the literatus in comparison with all other ranks 
 and professions. Thus many are found like the following : — 
 
 " What does all this talk about an officer being better off than a scholar 
 amount to? Just look at an officer's life, and see how manifold are his 
 miseries. While still young he is shut up in a military school. He is 
 there punished until they make his head to bleed ; he is stretcbed out and 
 beaten. After that, he is sent to the wars into Syria. He must wander 
 on rocky heights, he has to carry his bread and drink suspended from his 
 arm, like unto a beast of burden. The water he gets is foul. Then he is 
 marched off to mount guard over the tent. After that, the enemy arrives 
 and catches him, as in a mousetrap. Should he, however, be lucky 
 enough to return to Egypt, he will only be like a worm-eaten block of 
 wood. Should he be sick, he is put on a litter and carried on a donkey's 
 back. His things, meanwhile, are stolen by thieves, and his attendants 
 run away." 
 
 Truly a picture of an Egyptian soldier's life worthy of 
 Joseph Bertha, h Consent. But other trades and professions 
 fare no- better when contrasted with the savant's noble state. 
 There are similar caricatures from the farmer's or peasant's 
 life, down to that of the barber, " who has to run from inn 
 to inn to get customers." Out of this high opinion of, and 
 eager desire for, literary education and refinement, there 
 grew almost naturally an eminently high ethical and moral 
 code of feeling. Take the following inscription over a tomb 
 at El-Kalb, over four thousand years old : — " He loved his 
 father, he honoured his mother, he loved his brother, and 
 never left his house with an angry heart. A man of high 
 position was never preferred by him to a humbler man." 
 There are many traces even^ of that chivalrous deference to 
 women which is always found in highly-cultivated nations. 
 The names of the husbands are more often omitted in the 
 
 n 2
 
 180 EGYPT, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 
 
 genealogical tablets than those of the "Ladies of the House," 
 whose principal ornament, the stones record, was their " love 
 to their wedded lords." They are called in the inscriptions 
 — not generally given to poetic phraseology — " the beautiful 
 palms, whose fruit was tender love," and the most glorious 
 present accorded to the favourites of the Gods is " the esteem 
 of men and the love of women." 
 
 The last chapter in the book is a valuable contribution to 
 comparative Indo-Germanic mythology, treating of certain 
 Sagas found both in Firdusi and the Nibelungen, and of a 
 number of mysterious customs and notions common to both 
 Persians and Germans. Although this is no less replete 
 with interesting facts and speculations than the foregoing 
 essays, we cannot further enlarge upon it here. All we can 
 do is once more to thank the eminent author, now dwelling 
 in that land which already has revealed to him so many of 
 its secrets, and to express the hope that, notwithstanding his 
 many official and editorial occupations, he will find leisure 
 again to speak to us thus pleasantly of Pharaonic scrolls 
 and stones.
 
 ( 181 ) 
 
 VIII. 
 HERMES TRISMEGISTUS. 1 
 
 Re-published by 2'>ermission. 
 
 Few figures in the Pantheon of the ancient world are as 
 many-sided and mysterious as Hermes, the antique imper- 
 sonation of Thought. It is he who institutes and practises all 
 sciences, all arts, all professions. A god himself, he is also 
 the Divine councillor and messenger, charioteer and cup- 
 bearer. He* is, further, an astronomer, a legislator, a priest, 
 a physician. He plays the lyre, he boxes, he tends the cattle. 
 He is the keeper of dreams, a merchant, a thief, and an 
 author. With the profoundest wisdom and the most recon- 
 dite lore, he combines the capability of playing cunning tricks 
 and coarse practical jokes. As multifarious as his talents 
 and his trades are also his emblems, his native countries, his 
 parentages, and his names. In Egypt he is — albeit self- 
 created — the son of the Nile and of Isis, and wears the head 
 of an ibis. He presides over the moon, defends the good 
 souls in Hades, and inscribes the names of the kings on the 
 tree of life in Paradise. The wrigglings of a serpent have 
 taught him the art of hieroglyphics, and his own name is 
 first spelt in these new signs, whence perhaps its many 
 variants — Toth, Teti, Teut, &c. In Phoenicia he is one of 
 the eight mystic Kabiri, or mighty ones. His father is the 
 Heaven, his mother the Day. He invents mining and metal- 
 lurgy, medicine and the alphabet — the same, by the way, 
 which we use in these days. His Phoenician name is Kadmus, 
 
 1 This article appeared in the complete, pre'ce'de'e d'irae e'tude sur 
 
 ' Saturday Review' for March 30, 1867, , L'origine des livres hermetiques, par 
 
 and reviewed the following work: — i L. Me'nard. Ouvrage couronne de 
 'Hermes Trismegiste.' Traduction l'lnstitut. Paris : Didier et C ie .
 
 182 HERMES TRISMEGIST1 s. 
 
 the Primeval or Eastern ; also Taaut. Passing over the 
 many various denominations and occupations assigned to the 
 great cosmopolitan by the Babylonians, Pelasgians, Etruscans, 
 and other but vaguely-known peoples, we find him in Greece 
 as the son of Zeus and Maia. How, but four hours old, he 
 steals and eats two oxen of Apollo, and forthwith invents the 
 lyre, whereby he soothes both him and Zeus, is well known. 
 It is he also who chains Prometheus, kills Argus, liberates 
 Io, conducts the goddesses before Paris, and does the thou- 
 sand and one other things in which, under the guise of 
 allegory, the myths seem to indicate various progressive 
 stages of culture. In Borne, where his rude statue in the 
 earliest days held a purse, his name was Mercury — from 
 mercari, to traffic. Merchants used to dip laurel rods into a 
 well near the Porta Capena sacred to him. What stages he 
 and his mystic worship passed through there, until in the 
 latter days he was identified with Anubis himself, we cannot 
 tell. Equally characteristic, however, is the manner in 
 which by slow degrees the archaic trunks or pillars that 
 were intended to represent him were endowed with a bearded 
 head, with a certain symbolic emblem — the removal of which 
 caused Alcibiades' downfall — with the petasus, the caduceus, 
 the palm-tree ; and how every successive generation of artists 
 added some new improvement, until at last he grew into that 
 beautiful, half-dreamy, half-artful, beardless youth of glorious 
 proportions, such as we know him in the Vatican and in the 
 British Museum. 
 
 When the gods of Greece and Eome went into exile — 
 either degraded into evil spirits or promoted into Christian 
 saints — he returned to the East. Taaut-Kadinus-Hermes- 
 Mercury-Anubis reappears in Arabic and Persian legends as 
 Henoch or Idris, the Mahommedan Elijah. Pitiful is the 
 way in which some Arabic writers try to spell his epithet of 
 Trismegistus, and the elaborate manner in which they explain 
 it. Three times, they say, was he born ; in three different 
 places — in Babylonia, in Egypt, in Greece ; and three times 
 • lid he go through life without sin. Further, he was king, 
 philosopher, and priest; or was, did, or did not any three
 
 HEEMES TKISMEG1STUS. 183 
 
 other different things. But the middle ages were as puzzled 
 about this figure as was antiquity itself. Everything about 
 Hermes seemed a mystery and an allegory. 
 
 To add to the bewilderment, he had also written Egyptian 
 books. Clemens of Alexandria ascribes to him 42 ; Jambli- 
 ehus, 20,000; Manetho the exact number of 36,525. Whether 
 these are the years of a sacred] Egyptian cycle, or so many 
 verses, distichs or hemistichs, or whether they are merely a 
 round figure to express the enormous bulk of sacerdotal 
 writings which Egypt produced, is of small importance here. 
 Suffice it to notice that everything above and below earth 
 and heaven was supposed to be treated in these books — from 
 the most divine mysteries of cosmogony and the essence of 
 God, to the discipline of kings and geography. But no pro- 
 fane eye had ever seen more than the outside of these sacred 
 scrolls, which were carried about in procession on certain 
 feasts, but the contents of which were never revealed to any 
 one beyond the priestly pale. Certain scanty hieratic papyri, 
 treating of medicine, and first deciphered in our days, are 
 the only fragments of this literature extant. 
 
 When, in the latter days of Borne, Egypt came to be 
 looked upon as the mother of all wisdom, the greatest curi- 
 osity began to be manifested anent these reputed works, the 
 divine mysteries of which might, it was thought, renew the 
 strength of a doomed world. But fire and sword had done 
 their work on the Nile. Every trace of that redeeming 
 literature seemed los.t for ever, when all of a sudden, a num- 
 ber of books came to light, nobody knew exactly how, bearing 
 the mighty name of Hermes Trismegistus. They treated, 
 exactly as had been surmised, of the Soul, of God, of Nature, 
 of Transmigration, of Immortality, and other theological and 
 metaphysical questions. They were supposed to have been 
 in Greek, translated from the original Egyptian, or, as was 
 held till within the last two hundred years, from the Arabic. 
 A more mysterious production, and one more strangely 
 reflecting the Proteus-like and ubiquitous nature of the God 
 of Dreams, could certainly not be found. These fragments, 
 such as they are now before us, are composed of the most
 
 184 HERMES TRISMEGISTUS. 
 
 widely divergent elements under the sun, but withal cun- 
 ningly woven into one [ harmonious whole. Most curious, 
 however, is the theology broached in them, which is Jewish, 
 Christian, and Platonic, or rather Alexandrian, and yet a 
 thing of itself. Monotheism, Polytheism, Pantheism, are all 
 equally represented, but none can call the work its own. In 
 the middle of the Egyptian Pantheon, with interlocutors 
 such as Isis, Horos, and Tat, we find the Logos, side by side 
 with the archaic myths of the Phoenician Cosmogony. The 
 Gnostic Demiurgos is plainly foreshadowed, and the argu- 
 ments for immortality are borrowed from the early mate- 
 rialistic schools of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. 
 The language, corrupt though it be, at times rises to a grand 
 melodious eloquence, and in some portions it becomes quite 
 patent that we have to deal with an originally rhythmical 
 composition. The Midrash has furnished it with many ft 
 favourite simile, and with many of its most gorgeous poetical 
 fancies. Altogether, these fragmentary writings seem a 
 kind of ancient most catholic microcosm, to which all creeds 
 and all systems have contributed their share, and in which 
 arguments may be found for and against every metaphysical 
 and speculative doctrine of East or West, archaic or recent, 
 that ever was conceived. 
 
 The Church Fathers did not know what to make of it all. 
 That these writings emanated from a heathen — god or man — 
 was clear enough: but then the dogma of the Trinity 
 appeared in them, and they call God "Divine Majesty" and 
 "Father." Some, like Lactantius, held the work to be the 
 echo of a primeval revelation which was much corrupted in 
 the course of time. Others, like Jamblichus, felt the strong 
 hand upon them, and unhesitatingly acknowledged the 
 transcendental nature of the book. "Truly," he says, "the 
 wav that leads to God, Mercurius has taught and described." 
 But still, how this wily god should have become possessed of 
 the true knowledge was a sore puzzle — a puzzle that has 
 occupied many a generation since, but which the scholiasts, 
 after their usual manner, have got over by declaring Hermes 
 to be the Devil incarnate.
 
 HERMES TRISMEGISTUS. 185 
 
 It would be interesting indeed to know who really wrote 
 these kaleidoscopic books. There breathes a fervour in them 
 that reminds us of the strange and strong exotic perfume, 
 which mav clinsr to a vase during all the centuries of its 
 entombment. A deep yearning for truth, for the under- 
 standing of the great mystery of the Cosmos, makes itself 
 felt in every line. The method is at times that of an adroit, 
 brilliant, quick fencer, who espies every weak point ; at 
 times, again, it proceeds with a vague dreaminess, pointing 
 to the stars or to the sea, and both thought and voice seem 
 hushed. There are sudden outbursts of love and of faith, 
 profoundly poetical and genuine. And through the whole 
 there runs a deep bitter sadness, as over a world of beauty 
 and joy which is about to sink back into chaos. That there 
 is also to be found in these vilely mutilated and mucli 
 " improved " fragments, longwindedness and clumsiness, 
 feebleness and venom, will not astonish those who are accus- 
 tomed to see the Censor rampant in ancient books which, 
 according to his notion, did not quite agree with the true and 
 orthodox faith of his own time. Perhaps, also, ancient 
 palimpsest-manufacturers produced supplements to Mercury 
 long before the goldmakers of the middle ages turned their 
 attention to the production of Hermetic literature. But 
 who wrote the Nibelungen, who the Vedas, who the Book 
 of Job? 
 
 Much more useful, however, for the understanding of the 
 book than the knowledge of its author's name, real or ficti- 
 tious, is the time in which he wrote. And of that time we 
 can just see the dim outlines. Of all the strange phases in 
 the religious history of mankind, none is so strange, none so 
 fraught with deep philosophical and psychological problems, 
 as that which followed the introduction of Christianity into- 
 the ancient world. Rome had then well nigh completed her 
 conquests. The barriers of East and West were broken down, 
 and from the remotest corners of the empire philosophers 
 and priests, scholars and teachers, flocked to Alexandria, to 
 Athens, to Rome, the chief academies and the emporiums of 
 thought. Here they discussed their respective creeds and
 
 ISC HERMES TRISMEGISTUS. 
 
 systems, and, however widely differing in the beginning, in 
 the end they had frequently exchanged and amalgamated 
 them, utterly unconscious of the process. Eclecticism was 
 altogether the chief characteristic of that period. Alexandria 
 had scholasticizcd, allegorized, and symbolized so long that 
 everything was at last explained to mean its very reverse. 
 Athens, or rather the educated classes of Greece, were votaries 
 of a Platonism identical with scepticism. As for Konie her- 
 self, that acute policy of hers which so readily admitted the 
 gods of Egypt and Persia into her promiscuous pantheon had 
 begun to bear the bitter fruit of grovelling superstition and 
 unbridled licentiousness. To all this there came the teach- 
 ings of Judaism, which through its adherents had spread 
 over a great part of the ancient world. The pure ethics of 
 that faith, even before they were brought out more pro- 
 minently by Christianity, the rigorous austerity with which 
 the Jews clung to their strange symbolic tenets — nay, the 
 exclusive spirit of Judaism itself — had something awe-in- 
 spiring to the antique mind. The irresistible manner in 
 which Christianity swept from the Euphrates to the Ganges, 
 and from the Nile to the Tiber, taking by storm a whole 
 world agitated to its lowest depths, and yearning for some 
 new and more human faith than any it had known before, 
 need not be dwelt upon. But what concerns us here is the 
 fact that all the ancient creeds seemed of a sudden to unite 
 against this common enemy. Polytheism, doomed to die, 
 would not surrender easily, but looked for allies even in the 
 samp of purest Monotheism. It used every effort, marshalled 
 every argument, touched every string. And when we read 
 Julian the Apostate's bitter and tearful elegy — for this seems 
 the only word for his celebrated pamphlet — when we hear 
 Libanius imploring the " ragged " priests and votaries of the 
 new faith to spare at least some of the temples, to leave a 
 few gold and silver treasures in the sanctuaries, and not to 
 .break every one of the marble statues ; when Symmachus in 
 the name of the senate prays that the one altar of Victoria, 
 by whose aid they had conquered the world, might be left 
 to the city — we cannot but feel a mournful sympathy with 

 
 HERMES TRISMEGISTUS. 187 
 
 these pleaders for the last remnants of the " springtime of 
 humanity." In the foremost ranks of the advocates of 
 Polytheism stood some of the very best men — philosophers, 
 poets, writers, men of education, refinement, and of high 
 social standing. They had but one word for Christianity — 
 Atheism. They denounced it as an impious, weird, unprac- 
 tical creed. They pointed to the golden splendour of 
 Hellenism, to the arts and the sciences, the prose and the 
 poetry, the men and the women it had begotten. They 
 pointed to the victories which their ancient gods, who were 
 now to be dethroned and degraded for the sake of the " pale 
 Galilean," had won for them. The notions of the Christian 
 Hell and Purgatory, of Satan and his angels of darkness, of 
 the awful fundamental mysteries of the new faith, were 
 repugnant to them beyond expression. The ethics, sublime 
 and simple, human yet divine, which the New Testament 
 teaches, w T ere, they said, taken from Plato, or were simply 
 Jewish. This open opposition, however, did not prevail. 
 The current was too strong. The anti-Christian champions 
 then bethought themselves of stratagems. Into the wild 
 chaos of so-called pseuclopigraphical writings — the missionary 
 tracts of the early centuries, named, in order to carry con- 
 viction more easily, after all possible biblical personages — 
 they threw their own gospel, cunningly adopting the enemy's 
 own language. Thus in the midst of the thousand prophecies, 
 revelations, epistles, evangels ascribed to everybody from 
 Adam and Ham to Nebuchadnezzar and the three men in 
 the fiery pit — and, as if there were not names enough in the 
 Bible, fathered upon some fancy names, such as Pachor, 
 Barkor, Balsemum, Abraxas, Arrnagil — there appears Hermes 
 Trismegistus. On a would-be ancient Egyptian " platform," 
 he pleads for anything and everything — Pantheism, Poly- 
 theism, or Judaism — against Christianity, but under so skilful 
 a mask that pious Church Fathers actually used him in their 
 charges to the faithful ; and thus, unwittingly, have preserved 
 some precious fragments that would otherwise have been 
 lost. 
 
 The principal and most complete of these Hermetic books
 
 188 HERMES TRISMEGISTUS. 
 
 is called Poemander, i. e. Shepherd of Men. It is not unlikely 
 that this name was given to it in imitation of the well-known 
 Christian "Pastor Hernias," very popular in those days. It 
 contains a cosmogony, made up of Greek philosophy and a 
 Hellenism that recalls both the joyful elasticity of Hellas 
 and the severe rationalism of Rome, of Jewish allegories, of 
 Egyptian legends, and even of Persian demonology, together 
 with Neoplatonic Christianity. The first Essence — the 
 Intelligence — creates another creative power, the Logos, 
 which again produces seven ministers for the seven heavenly 
 spheres. Man's soul is made by God, but his body is pro- 
 duced by himself, in a manner that reminds one of the story 
 of Narcissus. One of the theories principally insisted upon 
 with regard to the whole Cosmos is its imperishable nature, 
 " Nothing is lost, and it is only by mistake that changes are 
 called death and destruction," is the theme of a whole 
 chapter. There is also a " Sermon on the Mount," but it is 
 only the title that recalls that other " Sermon." Among the 
 other fragmentary writings, such as the addresses from 
 Hermes to Tat, his son, to Asclepios, and to Ammon, those 
 of the "Sacred Book" are the most characteristic and 
 important. Particularly fine is the description given here 
 of the creation of man out of certain unruly souls, and of the 
 arguments urged against it by the Elements, which foresee 
 the new being's wild and godless career. The whole piece 
 is Haggadistic in its shape and partly in its contents, but it 
 is also largely indebted to Plato's Timaius. 
 
 The most striking portion of the whole work, however, 
 seems to us to be that grandly weird " burden " pronounced 
 upon Egypt, or rather the whole modern world, which is 
 contained in the "Asclepios," or discourse of Initiation. It 
 isasif"der Menschheit ganzer Jammer" had been in the 
 mind of the man who wrote it. Having spoken of the 
 triumph of Christianity and the consequent return of the 
 gods from earth to heaven, he continues : — 
 
 "... You weep, Asclepios ! I have still more mournful messages. 
 • • • Egypt herself will fall into apostasy. . . . And, lull of the disgust 
 of all things, man will no longer admire and love this world. He will 

 
 HERMES TRISMEGISTUS. 189 
 
 turn away dismayed from this most perfect work, the best work of this 
 and of all times. In the general weariness and vexation of souls, this vast 
 universe will be disdained. This immutable work of God, this glorious 
 and perfect construction, this manifold assembly of pictures, where the 
 Divine Will, prodigious in miracles, has brought everything together into 
 one unique harmony, ever worthy of veneration, praise, and love. . . . 
 They will prefer darkness unto light ; they will hold death better than, 
 life. . . . No one will look up to the heavens. The man of religion will 
 be considered a fool, the impious a sage; fury will go for bravery; the 
 worst will be called the best. The soul, and all the questions connected 
 with it — whether it be born mortal, or whether it may aspire to im- 
 mortality — everything that I have exposed to you here, they will only 
 laugh at ; they will see sheer vanity only in it. . . . The Religion of 
 Intelligence will be persecuted ; new laws, new rights will be established ; 
 not a word or thought that is holy, religious, worthy of heaven and 
 heavenly things, will be tolerated. . . . Pitiful separation of gods and 
 men ! Nothing will remain but Wicked Angels ; they will be mixed up 
 with miserable humanity ; their hand will be upon it ; they will push it 
 into all evil undertakings — into war, rapine, lies, into everything contrary 
 to the nature of the souls. . . . The earth will no longer keep its balance, 
 the sea will no longer be navigable, the regular course of the stars will be 
 troubled in heaven. All Divine voices will be silent, the fruits of the land 
 will be corrupted, the soil will no longer yield fruit, the air itself will be 
 filled with dark torpor. Such will be the old age of the world, irreligion 
 and disorder, confusion of all rules — of all that is good. . . ." 
 
 After all this corruption the regeneration of the world, " the 
 holy restoration of nature" will be wrought by the " Lord 
 and Father " in a marvellous manner. 
 
 It is strange how these books of Hermes — to which in the 
 middle ages there were made many other spurious additions 
 — have been neglected. Even Parthey's edition — the first 
 critical one ever attempted — is not quite complete ; and 
 since " that learned divine Doctor Everard's " English trans- 
 lation of the "Divine Pymander" was edited by "J. F." in 
 1650, not the slightest notice seems to have been taken of 
 that remarkable work, or any other remnant of Hermes, in 
 England. In Germany the "Poeinander" has been trans- 
 lated once or twice within the last hundred years, but save 
 Baumgarten-Crusius (1827), no one seems to have paid any 
 particular attention to it. In France, Francois de Foix 
 translated and commented on it in 1579, and dedicated it to 
 Marguerite of Navarre. Ever since it has slept in peace till
 
 190 EERMES TRISMEGISTUS. 
 
 M. Menard, at the instigation of the Academy, took it up 
 acain and retranslated both the Poemander and the other 
 fragments. His version is, considering all the difficulties he 
 has had to contend with, creditable on the whole. But we 
 cannot bestow even that modicum of praise on the etude with 
 which he prefaces it, and for which we presume the Academy- 
 has bestowed the prize upon him. We wonder what his 
 competitors' essays must have been like. It certainly would 
 require a being as learned, as acute, as prophetical perhaps 
 as the divine Hermes himself to unravel all the different 
 threads which Judaism, Hellenism, and Egyptianism have 
 woven into this gorgeous fabric. But some approach to a 
 clearing-up might have been made, not by vague references 
 to MM. de Kouge and Vacherot, nor even by extracting 
 them, but by earnest and patient working at the bulk, not 
 only of early and late Hellenistic, but also of Haggadistic 
 and hieroglyphical sources. M. Menard seems to be as 
 innocent of the one as he is of the other, but he quotes the 
 Bhagavat-Gita. Interesting and elaborate as the essay 
 appears, considered as a contribution to general French 
 literature, it is deplorably shallow and windy when judged 
 by the depth and vast interest of the matter it pretends to 
 treat of. None but those who, with weariness of heart and 
 racking brains, have tried to penetrate through the learned 
 deserts which surround the subject can fully appreciate the 
 disappointment caused by this etude. There is a very good 
 reason why the profoundest German scholars have avoided 
 it. Where they feared to tread, M. Menard has rushed in, 
 and the result is his ponderous feuilleton. He evidently tries 
 to imitate M. Kenan. But M. Benan would have written 
 much more fascinatingly, if not more learnedly.
 
 ( 191 ) 
 
 IX. 
 JUD^EO-ARABIC METAPHYSICS. 3 
 
 Re-published by permission. 
 
 Given that most complex and fragmentary body of literature, 
 ranging from times beyond historic ken down to the fulness 
 of Hellenic culture, which we call collectively the Old Tes- 
 tament; given further those mazes of legal enactments, 
 gorgeous day-dreams, masked history, ill-disguised rational- 
 ism, and the rest which form the Talmud and the Midrash ; 
 given also the Kabbala, and, finally, Plato and Aristotle as 
 developed by Jews and Mohammedans either on the basis of 
 their fundamentally identical creed or independently — what 
 was the attitude of the Synagogue towards all these elements, 
 as far as they treated of the first problems of all religion and 
 all philosophy? What was the process whereby the widely 
 diverging statements and speculations on Creation, the Soul, 
 the Hereafter, the nature of the Deity, contained in those 
 authorities, were sought to be blended and harmonized so as 
 to satisfy both Jewish faith and thought ? — a faith fervent 
 and passionate beyond measure, to which all visions and all 
 transcendentalism and allegories were so many historical facts, 
 for all of which death was sweet and holy — and a boldness of 
 thought which, with all reverence, frankly said, as Socrates 
 had said, " That divinely revealed wisdom of which you speak 
 I deny not, inasmuch as I do not know it ; I can only under- 
 stand human reason." The everlasting battle between reason 
 and blind belief in "that which is written" was fought with 
 very grim seriousness in the early period of the middle ages 
 
 1 This article appeared in the 
 ' Saturday Keview ' for March 5, 
 1870, and reviewed the following 
 
 work : — ' Studien iiber jiidisch-arab- 
 ische Religious - Philosophic/ Von 
 Dr. A. Schrniedl. Wien: 1869.
 
 192 JUDxEO-ARABIC METAPHYSICS. 
 
 -within the bosom of the Jewish Church. And while we 
 survey the history of that controversy as it was taken up and 
 •continued in the Christian Church, we blush to find, from 
 the very days of Albertus Magnus, the Doctor Universalis, 
 and Thomas Aquinas, the Doctor Angelicas, down to our own 
 perfect nests of arguments both on the side of orthodoxy and 
 of rationalism, unconsciously perhaps, but most unmistakably 
 stolen from the mediaeval successors of those same Rabbis to 
 whom Jerome owed his Vulgate lore. To write a history of 
 Jewish metaphysics would indeed be an undertaking worthy 
 to rank with the highest, most difficult, most interesting 
 and instructive tasks ; especially if attempted as a contri- 
 bution to the history of human rationalism. The religious 
 development from, say Hillel the " freethinker," who calmly 
 compressed all the Law and the Prophets into the familiar 
 •' Be good, my dear," to Maimonides, the " Great Eagle," 
 who more explicitly and scientifically lays down the supreme 
 axiom that every word of the Bible must either be in accor- 
 dance with rational conclusions or be explained "meta- 
 phorically," and who totally denies an " individual " working 
 of Providence ; and on to Baruch Spinoza, in whom Goethe — 
 how much of this nineteenth century besides ? — lives and 
 moves and has his being — this would indeed be goodly work 
 for a whole lifetime. 
 
 Our author has not attempted anything so ambitious. 
 Very far from it. He is satisfied with gathering a few 
 mosaics from the discussions on these metaphysical topics in 
 the Judaio-Arabic schools ; and we are duly grateful. In the 
 circumscribed field which he has chosen he has worked con- 
 scientiously, and on the whole veiy successfully. But the 
 curse of wishing to write "popularly" has been upon him, 
 and consequently, being bereft of that very special gift of 
 enthusiasm which is akin to poetry, and which at times is 
 found to lend a strange charm even to the most abstruse 
 subjects, he has so far failed. The mere discarding of learned 
 notes is not always sufficient to make a book either striking 
 or pleasant. Nor has Dr. Schmicdl always been happy in 
 the methodical arrangement of his subjects : whence spring
 
 JUD.EO-ARABIC METAPHYSICS. 193 
 
 repetitions of a needless and very tedious kind. There is also 
 a looseness of style and language which a little care would 
 have obviated. Having delivered our soul of these slight 
 objections, we shall give a brief glance at the varied contents 
 of the volume itself. 
 
 The first disquisition or chapter — the subject of which is 
 taken up again in the second — treats of the Deity as con- 
 ceived by Jewish philosophy. The existence of God is of course 
 presupposed ; or it would no longer be Jewish philosophy. 
 But what about his attributes ? Has He auy ? Scripture, 
 literally taken, seems to affirm this. Yet, taken in a higher 
 sense, as understood by the Alexandrines, the Targum, and 
 the Talmud, it denies it. Philosophy, on its part, found a 
 contradido in adjecto in an absolute Being or Supreme Cause 
 the sole essence of which is its Oneness and Uniqueness, 
 being considered, either subjectively or objectively, as present- 
 ing qualities or accidenees. This contest between the "Attri- 
 butists" and "Nonattributists" was indeed one of the fiercest 
 and bitterest, and each camp boasted of brilliant champions. 
 But the latter carried the day, led by no meaner authorities 
 than Ibn Ezra, Jehuda Halevi, and Maimonides. The last 
 of these goes the length of calling the view of his antago- 
 nists anti- Jewish. " As well might you say at once that 'He 
 is One but rather Three, besides being Three but rather One.' 
 If you give attributes to a thing, you define this thing ; and 
 defining a thing means to bring it under some head, to com- 
 pare it with something like it. God is sole of His kind. 
 Determine Him, circumscribe Him, and you bring him down 
 to the modes and categories of created things." The Talmud 
 in its characteristic way relates the story of a precentor who 
 heaped divine epithet upon epithet, and whom a master asked 
 when he had finished — "And have you now quite exhausted 
 God's good qualities?" The Psalms speak of "silence" as 
 the best mode of praising God. Nor is the endeavour which 
 goes through all postexilian literature, of finding a kind of 
 medium between the Inconceivable and the world of matter, 
 foreign to this notion. "Word," or " Holy Ghost," or " She- 
 chinah," are the forms under which Judaism at that early 
 
 o
 
 194 JUILEO-ARABIC METAPHYSICS. 
 
 period tried in its speech and thought to approach that which 
 itself, shrouded in the ineffable mystery of the Tetragram- 
 maton, was beyond human thought or approach. Indeed, we 
 should say that the whole Angelology, so strikingly simple 
 before the exile, and so wonderfully complex after it, owes 
 its quick development on Babylonian soil to the same awe- 
 stricken desire which grows with growing culture, removing 
 that inconceivable Ens further and further from human touch 
 and ken. At the same time the Talmud protests against 
 anything like the notion of angels interceding on the part of 
 man. They are nought but messengers, created for the pur- 
 pose of their message. More clearly still does Maimonides 
 call every natural law, every being, animated or other, so 
 that it fulfils a certain behest, an "Angel." Thus, he says. 
 a prophet is an angel ; the elements are angels ; the stars are 
 angels ; and so are the sea, the winds, and the human intel- 
 lect. "When the Talmud speaks of God as having consulted 
 the angels (*' the Circle or Family above") in the fashioning 
 of every part of the human organism, this, he says, shows 
 that everything in creation is done in accordance with the 
 manifold laws of nature, each ruling over its own sphere, and 
 all coming more or less into play in the complicated human 
 frame. Again, when the Talmud reduces the number of 
 angels whom Jacob saw in his dream at Bethel to four, two 
 mounting upwards and two descending downwards, it merely 
 hints at the wondrous weaving and working in the Cosmos 
 by the four fundamental elements — fire and air which strive 
 upwards, and water and earth which tend downwards. And, 
 as if to leave no doubt, the Talmud had further culled think- 
 ing man superior to the angels. This dictum, however, was 
 fiercely contested in the mediaeval schools. Is man greater 
 because he has a will and may struggle against evil, while 
 the angel can only do what he is bidden? or because man 
 is the centre of creation, even as the earth, according to the 
 astronomy of the period, rests in the middle of the universe? 
 And some schools unhesitatingly doubted and denied the 
 very truth of this opinion enunciated by the Talmud. Is 
 man greater than other creatures ? And is he the aim and 

 
 J TJD.EO- ARABIC METAPHYSICS. 195 
 
 end of the creation, or merely the most perfect organism on 
 earth ? Saadia holds the former, Ibn Ezra and Maimonides 
 hold the latter, view. Scripture, argues the first, calls angels 
 " divine beings," and the stars (which the " angels " are sup- 
 posed to be moving) " sons of God." But remember, Ibn Ezra 
 says, how infinitely larger certain stars are than the whole 
 earth, and do you think that the inconceivably vast host of 
 the heavens can be meant for, and inferior to, the small 
 dust-born human being? Still more sharply does Maimo- 
 nides ridicule the very notion of " stars or angels " being- 
 made for the sake of man, who by the side of these " intelli- 
 gences " sinks into utter insignificance. The practical conse- 
 quence of this discussion was that the " honourable mention," 
 not to say " invocation," of angels — which had been stamped 
 out by the Talmud, and which had grown up again by stealth 
 under foreign influences — now received its death blow. Even 
 the minor masters call it rank idolatry. And the Kabbalists, 
 to whom Angelology is almost the first condition of religious 
 existence, are forced to plead that all those endless varieties 
 of their holy names are but so many anagrams of divine and 
 biblical epithets, and that it is God and not " Patrons " whom 
 they invoke. To stretch the point to the utmost, it was 
 distinctly denied that when Joshua prostrated himself before 
 the angel, he intended to show the angel any reverence. He 
 bowed down before Him who had deemed him worthy of a 
 message — even as a man shows honour even to a dead piece 
 of paper which comes from some one he reveres. 
 
 Among the many topics further touched upon in the book 
 before us, such as prophecy, metempsychosis — the notion of 
 which, we may passingly observe, Saadia calls "sheer insanity " 
 — the resurrection, allegorism, &c, we would fain have dwelt 
 somewhat more fully upon the Anthropomorphisms and 
 Anthropopathisms in the Bible with which Judaism, pro- 
 perly so called, had from the beginning dealt unsparingly. 
 From the Targum, which scrupulously effaces every term 
 which might lead to the thought of a corporeal existence of 
 God, to the Midrash, whose most daring protest against the 
 human similes used even by the prophets Maimonides 
 
 o 2
 
 190 JUDJSO-ARABIC METAPHYSICS. 
 
 approvingly quotes ; from the broad axiom of the Mislmah, 
 that these things are not to be taken literally — " the Thorah 
 speaking merely in a human way " — to the days when Yedaya 
 Penini could say that at last this Anthropomorphistic 
 absurdity had been finally driven even from the obscurest 
 brains — Ave find one endless series of attempts to get rid of 
 all materialistic interpretation of undoubtedly materialistic 
 terminology. Rough, indeed, is the manner in which 
 Maimonidcs disposes of the " Voice " on Sinai, or God's 
 "descending thereon" — which the Talmud already declares 
 to be but a figure of speech — and nothing can be more 
 characteristic than the almost contemptuously good-natured 
 manner in which he finally allows the hopelessly unthinking 
 to do as they please about these things. " If some of the 
 shortsighted will not rise to the step to which we endeavour 
 to lift them, let them by all means imagine all such terms 
 (Angels, &c.) to refer to something material — no great harm 
 will come of it." It was indeed only the devotees of Kabbala 
 and Karaism who still protested against these rationalizing 
 Talmudistic views, and their end has been either petrifaction 
 and death, or, worse still, coarse imposture and religious 
 delirium. 
 
 We here take leave of our author grateful for his sugges- 
 tive and learned " Studies," and hoping soon to meet him 
 again on the same field. But let him not be afraid of 
 bringing with him his whole apparatus next time, however 
 bulky it may be.
 
 ( 197 ) 
 
 X. 
 
 LES APOTRES. 1 
 
 " Without haste, without rest," M. Renan proceeds with his 
 idyl of the Origins of Christianity. Two years and a half 
 have now elapsed since the publication of his ' Life of Jesus' ; 
 an interval during which he hopes "some of his readers will 
 have learnt to look somewhat more calmly upon these pro- 
 blems." In accordance with the programme sketched out in 
 that volume, the present instalment treats of the Apostles. 
 But the author has thought fit to alter the original plan in so 
 far that not the period from the death of Jesus to the end of 
 the first century, but only the history of the twelve years 
 33 — 45 is contained in the present book. St. Paul's con- 
 version, not his labour, is spoken of here ; he is to form the 
 central figure of the next book, which will commence with 
 his first mission. 
 
 We confess at once that a more seductive, but also more 
 trying task than that of pronouncing upon this book has 
 rarely fallen to our share. While we read it and read it 
 again, it carries us away, swiftly, irresistibly. There is in it 
 a pathos which stirs the mind to its inmost depths. The 
 power of its diction is wondrous sweet and strong. Picture 
 follows picture, musical cadence follows cadence, epigram- 
 matic casuistry suddenly changes into broken accents of love, 
 — the vast glory of the antique fades before a dark group of 
 sainted women. Jerusalem the Golden rapidly nearing her 
 supreme hour, — Antioch and all her marble gods, — the 
 
 1 This article appeared in the 
 'Athenaeum' of May 12, I860, and 
 reviewed the following work : — ' Les 
 
 Apotres.' Par Ernest Renan. Paris, 
 Levy; London, Nutt. 
 
 lie-printed by permission.
 
 198 LES APOTRES. 
 
 waving lily-fields of Galilee and the million- voiced life of the 
 Urbs et Orbis, — Paul, the proud, learned, passionate, refined 
 convert, and the lowly band of peasant-disciple?, whose only 
 wisdom was to love their Master "jusqu'a la folie," — psycho- 
 logical and physiological problems, and chiefly the working 
 of those mystic powers that move between light and darkm 88, 
 between life and death: — all these, and a thousand other 
 themes, are touched upon in rapid succession with cunning 
 hand ; and through the whole there breathes a fervour strange 
 and strong as some heavy exotic perfume, — an ardent adora- 
 tion of something indefinite, dreamy, ideal, which takes our 
 hearts and our senses captive, hushes the loud protest and 
 lulls our doubts into repose. We yield to the spell, and 
 "shut out thinking." 
 
 But when we wake from this trance and try to grasp th<> 
 argument, to realize the story, its divine heroes and heroines, 
 we seem to be trying to realize what we have heard and seen 
 in dreams. The landscape erst so sunny lies veiled in a mist, 
 the living men and women have become like unto shadows, 
 and when they speak their voice is thin. A thousand incon- 
 gruities and impossibilities become apparent at once. In this 
 book, perhaps even more than in the former, the gaps of 
 history are filled out by visions. Fact, or at least tradition, 
 is blended with fancies. And it is far from easy to separate 
 again what the hand of an artificer like M. Renan has welded 
 together, principally when, as is not rarely the case, he pur- 
 posely seems to have avoided fathoming the real state of 
 things to the full, lest it might interfere with the more 
 picturesque or poetical conception. 
 
 When compared with the former volume, the present one 
 seems to be somewhat inferior in verve. Not that M. 
 Renan's style is less brilliant, his skill of grouping — posing, 
 we might say — less consummate, or his diction less like a 
 blending of Victor Hugo and Lamennais. But there is some- 
 thing pointedly conciliatory in his tone. His views about 
 miracles and the "supernatural" are certainly unchanged — 
 perhaps, if possible, more advanced still ; but he states them 
 rather differently. He argues, he reasons, where before he
 
 LES APOTRES. 199 
 
 pronounced. He is exquisitely courteous, and always on his 
 guard not to offend by the form of his utterance. But from 
 this there springs at times a great uncertainty as to his 
 meaning. When, after having utterly disproved a thing, he 
 continues to speak of it as an existing reality, he reminds us 
 slightly of a modern poet invoking Apollo and the Muses ; 
 only that a universal agreement about Apollo and the Muses 
 being a glorious dream of the past may be taken for granted, 
 while dogmas and miracles are to many people still some- 
 thing very real indeed. Science should never be vague ; it 
 should leave us no doubts as to the writer's own meaning ; on 
 all occasions it should use nothing but explicit, clear and 
 decisive terms after the verdict has once gone forth. His 
 eagerness not to vex leads M. Renan almost into flirting with 
 orthodoxy pur sang, and, more characteristic still, with 
 Imperialism — Cesarisme, as he has it. He professes great 
 admiration for the centralizing system of Eome, which not 
 only gave her, in his opinion, the power over East and West 
 but which also gave to the still and pensive minds, the 
 votaries of science and art, the ease and the leisure for their 
 solitary musings. No wonder if, as we hear, liberal France 
 should have taken great offence at this new line of the late 
 Professor of the Hebrew chair. 
 
 Another point, and one of the most vital, is the flagrant 
 want of acquaintance displayed in this volume with certain 
 sources which, in the Introduction to the first, were spoken 
 of so hopefully and confidently. We mean those terrible 
 mounds of " Chaldee " literature, to which of late our atten- 
 tion has been drawn more and more : — The Targums, the 
 Talmuds, the Midrashim, even the Zohar, and the rest of late 
 Kabbalistic lore. Hie Rhodtis, hie salta. They, and nothing 
 but they, we believe, can give us a real notion of the mental 
 atmosphere, of the dogmas and doctrines, the ethics and 
 ceremonies, the sagas and parables, the prose and the poetry, 
 of the time when Christianity was born. It was far from suf- 
 ficient to adduce, as the author has done in the first volume, 
 some scanty fragments of legendary lore out of old collec- 
 tions, and try to verify them with foreign aid. Little is to be
 
 200 LES APOTBES. 
 
 gained, after all, by tracing a few parallel instances of pro- 
 verbial sentences. What was wanted now, and what we 
 looked forward to in this book, was the proof of the existence, 
 within the Jewish community, of such notions as the Logos, 
 the Trinity, the working of the Holy Ghost, the suffering and 
 redeeming Messiah. Further, what ideas terms like Son of 
 God, Son of Man, Gift of Tongues, and the like, originally 
 conveyed to the popular mind ; what were the notions of the 
 Schools about Redemption, Regeneration, Repentance, Confes- 
 sion of Sin, Baptism, Absolution, and a thousand other things 
 current among the contemporary Jewish world, but utterly 
 bewildering to the Gentiles, and, let us confess it, still far 
 from clear to our own generation, after well-nigh two 
 thousand years' working. The style, the idiom, the in- 
 numerable open and latent allusions, the form and substance, 
 in fact, of the fundamental Books of Christianity contained 
 in the New Testament, written, as Lightfoot has it, by Jews, 
 among Jews, for Jews, (" « Judwis, atque inter et adJudseos") 
 can only be properly appreciated and thoroughly understood 
 by constant reference to the oral literature of the period. 
 
 We did not expect M. Kenan to succeed where no one has 
 succeeded before him. He is far from being able to grapple 
 with a task like this. But he should at least have en- 
 deavoured to illustrate, from the materials already at hand, 
 some of the most prominent and obvious points. Second-, 
 nay, tenth-rate sources would have taught him to avoid 
 flagrant errors like that of the " Regeneration " being an 
 idea of which no one had ever heard before; while nothing 
 can be more common than the adage that " a proselyte's mind 
 becomes like that of a new-born child. " The Midrash even 
 explains the passage in Genesis (xii. 5), " the souls they had 
 ■made (gotten) in Haran," to refer to new converts, who were 
 to be considered as newly born from the moment when they 
 embraced the faith. He would have known that the voice 
 from Sinai was said to have divided itself into seven, or 
 seventy, fiery tongues — according to the supposed number of 
 nations on earth — "just as the hammer strikes many sparks 
 from the iron upon the anvil ;" and he should have used this
 
 LES Al'OTRES. 201 
 
 most popular notion in his explanation of the gift of tongues. 
 He would, if he had really looked into these matters, have 
 avoided that most fatal note (p. 262), " It is well known that 
 no manuscript of the Talmud remains by which the printed 
 editions could be checked," — while scores and scores of 
 codices, for the most part fragmentary, but fully available 
 for a critical edition (such as is now in hand), are scattered 
 all over the public libraries of Europe, in Italy, in France, in 
 England, in Germany, in Russia, in Holland. The imperial 
 Library in Paris alone contains eight — oddly registered — 
 MSS., with almost unexamined fragments ; and, no doubt, 
 the Mazarin Library counts some valuable portions among its 
 treasures, — only that its Catalogue must for Talmudical works 
 be consulted under "Haeretici," under which heading, as 
 Lebrecht says, " Rabbi Gamaliel and Calvin, Rabbi Akiba 
 and Luther, slumber peacefully together." It is this same 
 vagueness of information about the Talmud which recently 
 caused a writer in one of our Quarterlies to make an extra- 
 ordinary computation about the probable size of this book. 
 Judging from a special edition of the Mishnah, in six folios, 
 he reckoned, if we remember rightly, that the Talmud must 
 needs fill ninety — unconscious, apparently, of the fact that it 
 has been printed times innumerable (there are five different 
 editions in the press at this moment), and that it is almost 
 invariably printed in twelve volumes. This state of things 
 reminds us very forcibly of our old friend the " Rabbinus 
 Talmud," and we think it high time that it should cease. 
 
 But to return. We know full well that a knowledge 
 requisite for such a history of the " Origins," in fact, for such 
 a Commentary on the New Testament, as we have it, ideally, 
 in our mind's eye, — a knowledge which should not only know 
 at what particular spot in these mounds it should excavate, 
 but, having excavated, would understand how to sift and use 
 these materials properly, with a profoundly pious and reve- 
 rential mind, — a knowledge not narrow, sectarian, one-sided, 
 but catholic, human, large, one to which Homer and Horace 
 and Goethe and Tennyson should not be more foreign than 
 Church Fathers, and archaeologists, palaeographers and anti-
 
 202 LES APOTRES. 
 
 quaries, — a knowledge, above all, which, in awaking the long- 
 buried past, should always remain mindful of the living pre- 
 sent, its aspirations and its wants : — such a knowledge, we 
 know, is not easily found or easily gotten. But an approach 
 to the ideal might be striven after, and the task which we 
 have indicated is one as high and noble as it is pressing. 
 
 It will not be necessary for us to enter into the general 
 question of Kenan's book, " theologically considered." This 
 we must leave to the special theologians of the different 
 schools. We shall only endeavour to give an idea of it as a 
 work of science, as which he has sent it forth. His own 
 standpoint is so well known that it would be utter waste of 
 breath to reason upon it at this time of the day. As we said 
 before, the present volume treats only of the first twelve 
 years of the new creed. It is as w r ell that these twelve years 
 should occupy a special place ; for it is that period which has 
 decided the existence of a church that, starting without a 
 name and without almost any distinguishing feature, save 
 the belief in its founder, — a church which for a time was con- 
 sidered, and considered itself, neither more nor less than a 
 small band of most orthodox and rigorous Jews, keeping the 
 ceremonies more strictly than the " Pharisees" themselves, — 
 has conquered and regenerated the world. During this period 
 it was that dogmas the most vital, like the Resurrection, the 
 influence of the Holy Ghost, and the rest, became christian 
 dogmas. The organization of the Church of Jerusalem, its 
 first trials and triumphs, how it spread to Antioch, and there 
 first became conscious of being a thing distinct from Judaism,, 
 there also adopted for ever the name given to it by strangers 
 in ignorance or derision, — how, above all, that most startling 
 and, to the young community, most repulsive notion of 
 opening the gates to the heathen sprang into being, — what 
 were the nature and circumstances of these Gentiles, intellec- 
 tually, politically, morally, socially, and theologically, and 
 how their admission acted upon the faith of the community : 
 — these are indeed topics which deserve a large space all 
 their own. 
 
 St. Paul, as we have mentioned, is not included in this book
 
 LES ArOTRES. 203- 
 
 called "The Apostles." His conversion alone is recounted 
 as an event of the time, and its importance is duly dwelt 
 upon. But he is not an apostle, properly speaking, although 
 he assumes that name. He represents, the author says, the 
 travelling and the conquering Church ; but he himself is, 
 withal, but " a labourer of the second hour, almost an 
 intruder." And here M. Eenan takes the opportunity of 
 formally protesting against what he calls the fashionable 
 notion of our day — of looking upon Paul, rather than upon 
 Jesus, as the founder of Christianity. Not only is he not to 
 be compared to Jesus, but not even to the last of his 
 disciples. The only reason for his standing out so pro- 
 minently in history he finds in the greater amount of written 
 information that has survived regarding him. Important 
 though he be, yet he had not tasted " of the ambrosia of the 
 Galilean preaching," but only of its " aftertaste." In fact, 
 the early Church looked upon him with great suspicion — nay, 
 as upon a " Simon Magus." The Church of Corinth, although 
 founded by him exclusively, pretended to be founded jointly 
 by Peter and him, in order to be able to boast of the former's 
 name and authority. Papias and Justin do not even mention 
 his name. The only difference was that " he had a theology, 
 Peter and Mary Magdalen had not"; and for this reason 
 Christian theology, when written documents took the place of 
 oral tradition, gave him a higher place on account of his 
 extensive writings. 
 
 Apropos of Simon Magus, we shall be glad to learn in the 
 next volume what M. Kenan's exact notions of the inde- 
 pendent existence of this mysterious figure are. It is well 
 known that Tubingen (Baur-Volkmar) looks upon him as a 
 mere fiction, a type of Paul, invented by the Anti-Gentile or 
 Judaeo-Chrislians, and as whose bitterest adversary Peter 
 himself appears in the Clementines. But what we are most 
 eager to see solved in the next volume is the contradiction 
 between the author's emphatic protest against this "modern" 
 notion anent this Apostle — a notion as old, at least, as Toland 
 — at the beginning of the book and his own forcible argu- 
 ments in favour of this same notion later on : for there he
 
 201 LES APOTRES. 
 
 distinctly and repeatedly argues that, without Paul, that is, 
 without his energetic perseverance in admitting the Gentiles, 
 and disregardiug the " Law," — two things in which he holds 
 him. not only to have differed from the other disciples, but 
 to have directly deviated from the intentions of Jesus him- 
 self, — the young sect would have disappeared very speedily, 
 like fifty others of the time, without leaving a trace behind. 
 He speaks of the other Apostles as " small, narrow-minded 
 (etroits), ignorant, inexperienced, as much as they could 
 possibly be." If Paul, he says, had known Jesus alive, it is 
 doubtful whether he would have attached himself to Him. 
 " His doctrine will be his own, not that of Jesus ; the reve- 
 lations of which he is so proud are the fruit of his own brain." 
 " The Christ whom he had seen on the way to Damascus was 
 not the Christ of Galilee, but the Christ of his own imagina- 
 tion, of his own individuality. Nay, he avoids contact with 
 the disciples for a long time, lest he might be imbued with 
 notions and doctrines they, who had " tasted of the ambrosia," 
 had heard from their Master. At his conversion, sudden as it 
 was, " he had nothing new to learn. " This can only mean 
 that Christianity, at its outset, had no doctrines or dogmas 
 different from Judaism, " Pharisaical" Judaism to wit, save 
 the belief that the Messiah had appeared in Jesus, which 
 Judaism denied. "Pauline" Christianity, therefore, with its 
 abrogation of the " Law," must, according to M. Penan, be 
 considered as a thing totally different from the primitive 
 Christianity of the disciples and the first Church. Thus, the 
 author in the middle of the book, designates Paul virtually 
 as the originator of that Christianity which lives, and is to us 
 of much higher import than that original Christianity which 
 died, and which was practically Judaism in all but one point 
 — a point, moreover, by no means so vital, so fixed as is 
 generally assumed. The opinions of the contemporary 
 authorities were strangely divided on the Messiah question. 
 Yet he loudly repudiates this notion in the Introduction. 
 ♦Surely he does not protest for the benefit of readers who go 
 no further into the book ? Or shall we assume that he has 
 not fully made up his mind on the subject ? — This, however,
 
 LES APOTEES. 205 
 
 is but one of the many instances where vagueness of concep- 
 tion and the desire to hold an original ground of his own — 
 while his arguments all go in favour of a common contem- 
 porary notion — lead him into dilemmas or make him obscure. 
 Highly characteristic is the manner in which he makes 
 use of the opinions of investigators on the sources for this 
 book, and chiefly on the Acts. These sources — considering 
 that he virtually excludes all but those extant in Greek — lie 
 in a very narrow compass. The Acts he, too, holds to be 
 written by Luke : he dates them about 80, and from Eome ; 
 written there perhaps, he significantly adds, for Flavius 
 Claudius, — " a powerful personage, whose official position 
 required consideration," — a circumstance which to him would 
 explain many things. Noblesse oblige. We have not, indeed, 
 to look for anything like what we should call historical truth- 
 fulness in this account ; but then " it is only the sceptic who 
 writes history ad narrandum." " Le bon Luc," he thinks, is 
 a very different being from his master, Paul. The latter is 
 uncompromising, severe, "personal," heedless of anything 
 save the doctrine he holds and the ideas he wants to dis- 
 seminate — a " Protestant ;" while Luke impresses him rather 
 as a "good Catholic;" docile, optimist, calling every priest 
 a " holy priest," every bishop a " great bishop " (how very 
 like some other writers !) ; ready to embrace all kinds of 
 fictions rather than to acknowledge that these holv priests 
 and these great bishops quarrel and fight among themselves 
 in rather an unholy fashion sometimes. But Luke is strongly 
 impressed with the " ecclesiastical authority ; " the " Church 
 of Eome" seems already to have been present to his mind,, 
 and weighed upon it. He, the good Luke, could enter into 
 the political and hierarchical spirit by which this Church, 
 from the first centuries, was distinguished. He therefore 
 writes history as an apologist of the Court of Eome would — 
 " a toute outrance." He writes as an Ultramontane historian 
 of the time of Clement the Fourteenth would have written, 
 praising both the Pope and the Jesuits, or as that same per- 
 sonage will 200 years hence show that Antonelli and Merode 
 loved each other like brethren.
 
 20G LES ArOTRES. 
 
 "With the exception of the " hierarchy," which seems to us 
 to savour strangely of M. Eenan's early training, the kernel 
 of all this, viz., that the ' ; Acts " is a work cunningly written 
 so as to suit both the Gentile and the Judaeo-Christians, is 
 precisely what Schneckcnberger, Schwegler, Baur, Zeller, 
 nay, Michaelis, Paulus, and even De Wette, to some extent, 
 have long urged. But no one has contrived to exculpate the 
 author as M. Benan does. Craftiness and subtlety are the 
 terms those rude German rationalists apply to a writer who, 
 in their opinion, hacked and garbled and suppressed and 
 added in majorem fidei ghriam. A more terrific blow has 
 certainly never been aimed at the " systeme d'histoire eccle'- 
 siastique convenu " of which such writing as he represents it 
 would be a specimen, than M. Benan's defence. 
 
 But M. Benan does not go the whole length of Tubingen. 
 He does not think that the book is, for those reasons of 
 intrinsic falsehood and systematic misrepresentations, to be 
 rejected en bloc, even in its first chapters, which arc most 
 open to objections. He does not think that certain per- 
 sonages (the Eunuch, Tabitha, &c.) are entirely invented; 
 but some popular tales concerning them he assumes to have 
 been used skilfully to prove the two doctrines of the writer, 
 viz., the legitimate call of the Gentiles and the Divine 
 Institution of the Hierarchy. 
 
 We shall not pursue this point any further: firstly, 
 because we are repeatedly referred to the next volume, in 
 which the writer is going to speak fully on the authenticity 
 of these writings, and to the new edition of the first volume, 
 in which the author's opinions on the Fourth Gospel are to 
 be further elucidated and defended ; and, secondly, because 
 there is, as far as wo can see, nothing new in all that 
 M. Benan brings forward on these things, save the peculiar 
 colouring which he gives to the eclectic results of older 
 investigations. We may, therefore, safely defer what we 
 have to say on the subject until he brings forward his own 
 original results. But before we pursue the course of the 
 story itself, we must hear him speak once more on miracles, 
 in reply to the objections urged against his arguments in the 
 first volume.
 
 LES APOTRES. 207 
 
 The science of criticism, he says, can know nothing of 
 miracles. They are impossibilities ; and this is not a meta- 
 physical theory, but simply a fact of observation, of expe- 
 rience. No miracle has ever been proved ; but every 
 miracle, when closely examined, has turned out to be either 
 an imposture or a delusion. Catholicism, which still believes 
 in the power of working miracles, has never produced one, 
 except in out-of-the-way places. Let there be a miracle 
 wrought in Paris, under the eyes of competent men of science, 
 and there will be an end of all doubt. They have, without 
 a single exception, never been wrought before those who 
 were capable of discussing and investigating them properly. 
 It is not, as some argue, for those who doubt them to dis- 
 prove their reality, but for those who believe to prove them. 
 If Buffon had been asked to give a place in his " Natural 
 History" to centaurs and sirens, he would naturally have 
 asked to be shown some specimens first. "But you must 
 prove to us that they do not exist." " Xay," he would have 
 replied, "you must prove that they do." Why, M. Kenan 
 asks, does no one really believe in angels or demons, although 
 texts innumerable speak of them ? Because, simplv, the 
 existence of an angel or demon has never been proved. The 
 argument from the great phenomena of the UDi verse is a 
 simple fallacy. You cannot argue that because the nature 
 of the sun is not yet sufficiently known to astronomers, there- 
 fore it is a miracle, and therefore all reported miracles are 
 true. The creation is a grand marvel, but everything moves 
 in it according to everlasting laws. God is in all things 
 always, and to assume that sudden interferences are neces- 
 sary would be derogatory to His work and to Himself; as if 
 the universe, like a watch, wanted occasional mendino-. 
 And miracles reported in historical times are not to be proved 
 by a reference to pre-historic times. Nor is the "moral" 
 miracle of any greater weight. True, the success of Chris- 
 tianity is one of the greatest facts in the religious history of 
 the world; but it is not therefore a miracle. Buddhism, 
 Babism, and Islamism use exactly the same arguments as 
 Christianity. They had their miracles, their martyrs, their
 
 208 LES ArOTRES. 
 
 sudden and marvellous successes. And granting Christianity 
 to be a unique fact, — what of Hellenism ? Is not this the 
 ideal perfection in Literature, Art, Philosophy ? Does not 
 Greek Art surpass all other arts as much as Christianity 
 does all other religions ? If Christianity is a prodigy of 
 sanctity, Hellenism is a prodigy of beauty. A unique thing, 
 however, is not a miraculous thing. God is, in different 
 degrees, in everything beautiful, good and true. But in no 
 instance is his divine presence in any religious or philosophical 
 movement, a special privilege or an exception. " And if our 
 Church rejects us," he continues, " let us not recriminate ; 
 thanks to our modern days, this kind of hatred is impotent. 
 Let us take comfort in thinking of that invisible Church 
 which embraces the excommunicated saints, the best souls of 
 every time. Those whom one church has banished are 
 always its elect; they are in advance of their time. The 
 heretic of to-day is the orthodox of the future. And what, 
 besides, is the excommunication of man ? The Heavenly 
 Father excommunicates only the dry spirits and the narrow 
 hearts. If the priest refuses to admit us into his cemetery, 
 let us forbid our families to protest. God judges. The 
 earth is a good mother, that makes no distinctions ; the 
 body of a good man laid in the unconsecrated corner brings 
 its own blessing with it." 
 
 It is one man's duty, he says, to speak, another's to be 
 silent, although they may both think and feel alike. " The 
 good Bishop Colenso has committed such an act of honesty 
 as the Church has not seen since its origin, when he wrote 
 down his doubts the moment they came into his mind. But 
 the humble Catholic priest, in a country of a narrow and 
 timid spirit, must be silent. Many and many a discreet 
 tomb around village churches thus covers "les poetiques 
 reserves d'angeliques silences." Will the merit of those 
 whose duty it was to speak be equal to that of those secrets 
 which God alone knows ? 
 
 At this point the author enters into what we cannot help 
 describing as one of the most perfect personal explanations 
 or orationes pro domo which we have ever seen. Jarring as
 
 LES APOTEES. 209 
 
 many of its notes must be, — chiefly where he speaks of the 
 future Church, — it will yet enlist a great deal of sympathy. 
 
 He replies to the many personal attacks made upon him 
 with a calmness and moderation which are truly admirable. 
 The truth, he says, will not be furthered by " so much 
 agitation." The timid ought not to read what disturbs their 
 faith. " Practical people," again, lie says, have asked him 
 what has been his real object in writing this book ? " Eh, 
 mon Dieu ! le meme qu'on se propose en eerivant toute 
 histoire." To write a history, to investigate and to make 
 known the grand events of the past as accurately as possible, 
 and in a manner befitting them. "Had I to dispose of 
 several lives, I should spend one in writing a history of 
 Alexander ; another, in writing a history of Athens ; a third, 
 in writing a history of the French Revolution, or of the order 
 of Francis of Assisi. As to shaking anybody's faith, that 
 thought has been a thousand miles away from me." 
 
 He most emphatically denies having had the slightest 
 desire to combat established creeds. His is not the part of 
 a controversialist, but another more obscure — more fruitful 
 for science. So far from desiring to establish anything new, 
 he exhorts his readers to remain in their respective churches, 
 and to derive what good they can from them. He sees the 
 times of Avignon and the counter-Popes coming back once 
 more. The Catholic Church, he thinks, is about to pass 
 through a new sixteenth century; but, notwithstanding its 
 schisms and divisions, it will remain the Catholic Church : and 
 in a hundred years, the proportion of Protestants, Catholics 
 and Jews will be about the same, he holds, as it is now, only 
 that there will be more in each community who will believe 
 in the spirit rather than in the letter. The " pure Church " 
 does not want to raise its standard against the old ones, for 
 this would not accelerate, but retard, the general softening 
 of dogmatism. Luther and Calvin created Loyola and Philip 
 the Second. And, above all, Christianity must not be 
 weakened, for what should we be without it ? 
 
 When M. Eenan speaks of Christianity he means some- 
 thing different from what is usually understood by this term. 
 
 p
 
 210 LES ArOTRES. 
 
 Not the complex of dogmas and ethics, which we know by 
 that name, but brotherly love and charity, and the pure 
 adoration of the Supreme power, without any dogmatic 
 admixture, seems to be the ideal upon which he bestows this 
 name, or that other of the "Pure Church of the Future." 
 He concludes: — "Peace, then, 'au nom de Dieu!' Let the 
 different orders of humanity live side by side, not in falsifying 
 their own genius in order to make mutual concessions to 
 each other, but in mutually supporting each other. Nothing 
 should rule here below to the exclusion of its contrary ; no 
 power should be able to suppress the others. The harmony 
 of humanity results from the free emission of the most dis- 
 cordant notes. Let orthodoxy succeed in killing science, we 
 know what will then happen; the Mohammedan world and 
 Spain are dying because they too conscientiously fulfilled 
 that task. Let rationalism try to rule the world without 
 regard for the religious wants of the soul, the experience of 
 the French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences 
 of such a mistake. The instinct of Art, carried to the 
 highest delicacies, but without honesty, made the Italy of 
 the Pienaissance a cut-throat place. ' L'ennui, la sottise, la 
 mediocrite,' are the punishment of certain Protestant coun- 
 tries, where, under the pretext of good sense and Christian 
 spirit, Art has been suppressed, and Science reduced to 
 something ugly. Lucretius and St. Theresa, Aristophanes 
 and Socrates, Voltaire and Francis of Assisi, Eaphael and 
 Vincent de Paul, have equally reason to be, and humanity 
 would be less if a single one of its component elements were 
 wanting." 
 
 Here we shall, for the present, leave this book, which, pre- 
 eminent neither for deep erudition nor original research, for 
 scientific precision nor logical consistency, with visionary 
 fancies instead of facts, and a thousand and one faults of 
 conception and detail, yet cannot but be considered one of 
 the most remarkable and characteristic contributions to the 
 question of all time. 

 
 ( 211 ) 
 
 XL 
 
 FIVE LETTERS ON THE (ECUMENICAL 
 
 COUNCIL. 1 
 
 Tuesday, Sept. 14, 1869. 
 
 The curtain is about to rise upon that great Council of 
 Rome which has long been casting its shadows before. 
 Sixth of the Lateran or first of the Vatican, it can only be 
 called (Ecumenical at this time of the day by a stretch of 
 courtesy. iDasmuch as all " cardinals, patriarchs, primates, 
 archbishops, bishops, abbots with quasi-episcopal jurisdiction, 
 generals of orders, together with certain erudite men and 
 princely persons," are convoked, it is distinct from all other 
 kinds of Synods, national, provincial, and otherwise. But 
 Church historians do not agree as to the total number of 
 (Ecumenical Councils hitherto held. The well-known mne- 
 monic hexameter, " Ni Co E, Chal Co Co, Ni Co La, La La 
 La, Ly Ly Vi, Flo Tri," standing for iSlicaea, Constantinople, 
 Ephesus, &c, which counts but seventeen, is not accepted 
 by all. When, for example, the (Ecumenical Council of 
 Ephesus, in 449, had decided, not without the aid of "swords 
 and sticks and many monks' heels," that Eutyches' opinion 
 about the nature of Christ was the orthodox one, another 
 (Ecumenical Council, held eleven years later at Chalcedon, 
 decided that the decision of its predecessor was null and 
 void, and that so far from being an (Ecumenical Council, 
 it was a Council of Brigands—" Latrocinium Ephtisimim" 
 
 1 From the 'Times' of Sept. 14th and 21st, Oct. 5th and 19th, and Nov. 
 12th, 18G9. Re-printed by permission. 
 
 P 2
 
 212 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 Even so the Council of Basle was called " Basiliscontm 
 spdunca dsemonumque caterva," because it rebelled against 
 the Pope, its master. It will, therefore only deserve the 
 (Ecumenical when all will have gone well, and the Synod 
 that comes after shall have approved its doings. 
 
 Meanwhile there is much and loud knocking heard behind 
 the stage. The works of St. Peter, we learn, have nearly 
 reached their completion. Signor Sarti's plans having been 
 rejected, the device of Vespignani has been adopted instead. 
 The Papal throne stands at the end of the transept, the altar 
 of the Council in the centre, the stalls for the fathers being 
 grouped around, no longer, alas ! in eleven, but owing pro- 
 bably to urgent affairs in their respective dioceses, in seven 
 rows. The whole space, instead of being closed by an apse 
 at the Confession, will be shut in by a curtain, which can be 
 drawn aside so that the assembled multitudes may, as time 
 serves, behold the grand scene. The stenographers chosen 
 from the different nations, so that they may not stumble 
 over any foreign — say British — Latin, are rapidly mastering 
 their craft under one of the most experienced teachers. The 
 seven commissions, each presided over by a Cardinal, are 
 pushing on their work spite of heat, malaria, or due vaca- 
 tions. The Pope receives a daily report of their progress. 
 A special commission, composed of high dignitaries, are 
 appointed quartermasters, and Rome has to find lodgings for 
 her guests at their bidding. Nay, the inaugural sermon is 
 already weighing on the mind of Padre Luigi da Trento, 
 the Archbishop of Iconium, the Apostolic Preacher of the 
 Vatican. 
 
 Nor is literature, in the widest sense of the word, idle 
 on the subject. Articles and notices and essays and 
 pamphlets, Liberal and Ultramontane, rabid and sensible, 
 Catholic, Protestant, Rationalistic, and so forth, glut the 
 papers and the book market in honour of the coming 
 question of the hour. But mighty little is to be said of 
 these efforts, and he who would attribute to them a higher 
 value than that of, in the main, a catchpenny literature, 
 would be mistaken.
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 213 
 
 When was it that the last (Ecumenical Council closed ? 
 It was the Council of Trent, convoked in the throes of the 
 German Reformation : it sat and rose and sat again from 
 the 13th of December, 1545, to the 4th of December, 1563, 
 and its decrees were confirmed by the Pope early in the 
 following year. But at the beginning of it a sermon was 
 preached in which it was likened to the Last Council, 
 wherein Christ and the Apostles would sit in judgment over 
 the living and the dead. And the learned and pious have 
 ever since considered this a prophetical sermon, inasmuch as 
 between Trent and that supreme Synod there were to be no 
 more Councils. They were wrong, but so was the whole 
 world. No one would have dreamt of a like revival coming 
 to pass before our eyes. Nay, there were those who doubted 
 long after the preparations had commenced. Perhaps our 
 readers have forgotten the circumstances under which this 
 Council was ushered into the world. It may be well to 
 recapitulate. 
 
 On the 8th of December, 1864, the tenth anniversary of 
 the " dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception 
 of the Virgin Mother of God," there appeared, together with 
 an encyclical letter, the famous Syllabus, treating in ten 
 chapters and eighty paragraphs of the principal errors of our 
 time. On the 6th of June, 1867, seventeen questions, 
 chiefly on Church discipline (with regard to heretics, civil 
 marriages, &c), were addressed in a circular letter to all 
 the bishops. On the 26th of that same month the Pope 
 pronounced an allocution in the Secret Consistory, in the 
 presence of five hundred bishops, wherein he made known to 
 them his lon^-cherished desire to summon a General Council, 
 by the means of which the Catholic Church would celebrate 
 its highest triumph, convert her enemies, and carry the 
 Kingdom of Christ all over the world. The bishops replied 
 in an address that their hearts were filled with joy at this 
 prospect of a General Council, which could not but become 
 a source of unity, sanctity, and peace. The Pope received 
 the address joyfully, and, in accordance with their wishes, 
 placed the Council under the special patronage of her who
 
 21-4 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 had bruised the serpent's head, and promised that wherever 
 it was held it should be inaugurated on the anniversary 
 of the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception. On 
 the 29th of June, 1868, the Bull of the Indiction of the 
 Council was duly promulgated. This was followed, on 
 the 8th of September of the same year, by an Apostolic 
 Letter addressed to all the Bishops of the Oriental rite not 
 in communication with Koine, inviting them to be present 
 at the Synod " even as their ancestors had been present at 
 the second Council of Lyons and that of Florence," where 
 they were not allowed to vote and had to sit apart. Abbate 
 Testa was delegated to deliver these missives personally to 
 the schismatic bishops or patriarchs. Finally, on the 13th 
 of September, that Apostolic Letter to all Protestants and 
 other non-Catholics was indited, which exhorts them to 
 " embrace the opportunity of this Council " (occasionem 
 amplectantur hujus concilii). 
 
 We remarked at the time that the effect upon the schis- 
 matic mind of the East was scarcely to be called en- 
 couraging. The Greek Patriarch, would not look at the 
 letter, though it was handsomely bound in red morocco, and 
 emblazoned with gold letters bearing his own name. He 
 had read all about it in the newspapers, and did not see how 
 the Council could do aught but lead to further strife. The 
 peace once arrived at by the two Churches had long fallen 
 to the ground. His mind was perfectly easy on the subject. 
 And so the gorgeous volume was taken from the divan and 
 handed back to the delegate, who was bowed out and de- 
 parted in peace. The Metropolitan of Chalcedon returned 
 the Encyclical, with the simple but graphic " Epistrephete," 
 which might be freely rendered " Avaunt." The Bishop of 
 Varna did not see how he could accept what his master had 
 refused, and so he sent back the Encyclical. The Bishop of 
 Salonica had no less than five reasons for his declining, to 
 wit — 1. What would his Patriarch say ? 2. Why at Boine, 
 why not in the East ? 3. Because the Pope wants to get us 
 into his grasp ; 4. The Pope wears a sword, which is against 
 Scripture ; let him put it down and disband Ins army ; 5.
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 215 
 
 Let hini give up the " Filioque " and there will be no more 
 disunion between Greeks and Latins — which last proposition, 
 all things considered, is very delicious. Yet there were some 
 exceptions, which the official Eoman Press calls " consoling." 
 One schismatic bishop returned the letter, yet with the 
 promise that he would think about it for himself; and 
 another, the venerable Bishop of Trebizond, well stricken in 
 years, seems to have been quite overcome, and received the 
 Encyclical with the most profound tokens of reverence and 
 admiration, pressed it to his forehead, then to his bosom, 
 looked at it from all sides, for, alas! he knew not the 
 mystery of Latin characters, and exclaimed from time to 
 time, "Oh, Eome! oh, Rome! oh, Holy Peter! oh, Holy 
 Peter!" But, adds the official aceount quaintly enough, it 
 was utterly impossible to get anything else out of him — 
 notably, whether he meant to come to the Council or not. 
 
 The effect in Europe we have witnessed. That Catholic 
 Power which indeed is of the most vital importance in the 
 matter — France — has declared, through M. Baroche, the 
 Minister of Justice and Worship, before the Legislative 
 Assembly, in July, 1868, that the Government would place 
 no obstacles in the way of the meeting. It did not know 
 about sending representatives. It did not care for the 
 omission of a personal invitation to the Emperor. Church 
 and State should not be separated ; but it repudiated the 
 Syllabus, and prohibited its promulgation from the pulpit. 
 It would not admit the infallibility of the Pope. It would 
 take its stand upon the Concordat and the Organic Articles 
 — that arsenal of anti-Papal weapons which forbids the publi- 
 cation even of any Papal emanation without the previous 
 authorization of the Government. In the interval Austria — 
 the Austria of the Hapsburgs still — has torn her Concordat 
 to pieces and has punished priests. Spain, that other darling 
 daughter of Eome, has proclaimed, in the first hour almost 
 of its regeneration, liberty of conscience. In Bavaria, the 
 Government has asked the Universities whether the Syllabus 
 was likely to interfere with the rights and prerogatives of 
 the State. The Theological Faculty of Munich has answered
 
 216 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 within the last few days. Wurzburg takes further time. 
 Phrase it as cautiously as they will, the Professors cannot 
 help declaring that the Syllabus, whether accepted "nude et 
 pure " or " materialiter" negatively or positively, in the 
 redaction of Pater Schrader— who has already undertaken 
 the labour of transforming the negative Syllabus into a kind 
 of dogmatic Magna Charta — or not, it must eventually 
 occasion some not unimportant changes in the relation 
 between Church and State. And that State and Govern- 
 ment of Bavaria know enough now, and they have done the 
 civil thing too. 
 
 And amid all these signs and tokens the 8th of December 
 approaches rapidly. We may, perhaps, give the probable 
 programme of the beginning of the performance, as we may 
 gather it from previous similar occasions, notably Trent. 
 First of all, all Christendom will solemnly be called upon for 
 its prayers on behalf of the Synod. Next, one or several 
 days' fast will be proclaimed. On the day fixed, the 8th of 
 December, the Assembly will walk in solemn procession to 
 St. Peter's, where, on this occasion, the Papal throne will be 
 erected at the end of the transept, and the altar of the 
 Council in the centre, the stalls for the Fathers bein<r 
 grouped around it. The Pope or his Legate will then cele- 
 brate High Mass, and in the prayers the Holy Ghost will 
 be specially invoked. To all present a full remission of 
 their sins will next be announced, and blessings will be in- 
 voked both on the Pope and the Assembly, the Pope chant- 
 ing thrice, " Ut hanc sanctam Synodum et omnes gradus 
 ecclesiasticos benedicere et regere digneris." After this 
 the President — the Pope or his Legate — puts the question, 
 " Does it please you, to the honour and glory of the holy and 
 undivided Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, 
 to the increase and augmentation of the faith and the Chris- 
 tian religion, to the extermination of heresy, the peace and 
 unity of the Church, the improvement of the clergy and the 
 Christian people, to the suppression and extinction of the 
 enemies of the Christian name, to resolve and to declare that 
 this Council do commence and have commenced ? " The
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 217 
 
 Placet Laving been given, the next meeting being fixed, tlie 
 Anibrosian hymn of praise is sung, and the assembly dis- 
 perses. And what next ? 
 
 Profound mystery shrouds the proceedings. And yet, 
 perhaps, we may tell our readers in secret what we have 
 learnt on very good authority. Three things will be done 
 at the Council, which is not to last more than three weeks 
 altogether. The three things will be the declaration of 
 the infallibility of the Pope, which is to be proposed at the 
 beginning of the meetings by an English prelate ; the dog- 
 matised Syllabus will be made law ; and, further, the dogma 
 of the Assumption of the Virgin, derived from two apocry- 
 phal writings of the fifth century, will be proclaimed. We 
 hope to return to all three. 
 
 So much for the work of the Session. This Council will 
 in many ways be different from its predecessors. From 
 Nicsea to Trent, they always used to be convened in order 
 to devise means against some special enemy, be it Anus or 
 Luther, Henry IV. or Frederick II., the Saracens or the 
 Templars. Occasionally the Jews also were taken into con- 
 sideration, as at the fourth Lateran Council the yellow patch 
 was made canonical. Casually, also, as at the fifth Lateran 
 Council, the fair formerly held at Lyons was transferred to 
 Geneva, and the like important matters. But generally 
 there was some very special and pressing emergency, some 
 schism, some flagrant error or scandal to be met in solemn 
 conclave convoked generally by both the secular and the 
 spiritual powers. What is this Council convened for ? The 
 Encyclical says : — 
 
 " It is well known by how horrible a tempest the Church is now shaken. 
 ... By the most bitter enemies of God and men has the Catholic Church 
 and its salutary doctrine, and venerable power, and the highest authority 
 of this Apostolic see been assailed — trodden under foot ; all sacred things 
 have been despised, ecclesiastical goods have been plundered, the bishops 
 and highest ecclesiastical dignitaries and Catholic men harassed in all 
 manners, religious orders extinguished, and all kinds of impious books and 
 pestilential journals . . . have been spread abroad. ... In this (Ecu- 
 menical Council shall all those things be most accurately examined ana 
 determined which in these particularly hard times have particular refer-
 
 218 FIVE LETTEKS ON 
 
 ence to the greater glory of God, the integrity of the faith, the worthy 
 celebration of Divine worship, and the everlasting salvation of men, 
 the discipline and the salutary and solid instruction of the clergy, and the 
 observance of the ecclesiastical laws, the improvement of morals, the Chris- 
 tian education of youth, and the common peace and concord of all. And 
 with the most intense eagerness we must strive, with God's good help, to 
 remove all evils, both from the Church and civil society." 
 
 " Nee credo quod Papa possit scire totum quod potest 
 facere per potentiam suam," writes the Augustine monk 
 Augustino Trionfo of Ancona, in bis " Sum of the Power of 
 the Church " — " I do not believe that the Pope could know 
 all that he can do by his power." He shows in that book 
 that the Pope has not merely power over heaven and hell, 
 but also over purgatory, and by his indulgences could clear 
 it at once, only he thinks that he had better not do it if he 
 can help it. Pius IX., who, somehow or other, has contrived 
 to lose the best part of his patrimony, to put himself in the 
 wrong with the secular powers, with all Italy — that same 
 Italy which once hailed him as her champion and liberator, 
 and which now with the last remnant of pious patience 
 awaits his death to crown herself at Pome — may do all he 
 says. The world may fall at his feet when the Syllabus is 
 proclaimed, when the Blessed Virgin's assumption is made 
 into a dogma, and when he is infallible, he and every single 
 Pope that ever lived. But, perchance, it may not. If not, 
 he may imitate the example of Benedict XIII., who, for- 
 saken by all Christianity, retired to his castle of Peniscola, 
 there to pronounce his anathema over all Christendom. 
 And when the Council of Constance had formally deposed 
 him he pointed to his few faithful monks and said, " At 
 Peniscola, and not at Constance, dwells the Church ; even as 
 in Noah's Ark there was whilom assembled all humanity." 
 
 And, indeed, though at Pome, and though in the midst 
 of his prelates, about whose poor part in the whole trans- 
 action we shall yet have to speak, Pius IX. already sits in 
 grim solitude. The last paragraph of the Syllabus declares 
 it a damnable error to suppose that the Pope " can or ought 
 to reconcile himself and come to an understanding (recon-
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 219 
 
 ciliare ct componere) with progress, liberalism, and modem 
 civilization." Was anything ever more precise ? Never has 
 the curse pronounced by Innocent III. upon our Magna 
 Charta and the Barons that framed it been abrogated, but 
 it has grown and spread since, and two worlds rest under its 
 shadow in peace. That " disgrace to the English nation," 
 that " thing of no account," which, in its thousand reflections 
 and images, has now become the supreme law of nearly all 
 civilised nations, shall they, shall we abrogate it at the 
 Council's bidding ? Or shall not the winds of Heaven carry 
 back to Koine its own weird cry, echoed by a whole world, 
 Non Possumus? 
 
 September 21, 1869. 
 
 Roma locuta est. But what a difference between the 
 answers once and now ! " The only line of conduct on 
 the part of the Government with regard to the (Ecumenical 
 Council is one of complete inaction." Thus, telegraphically, 
 Catholic Belgium, since we last wrote. And, as a matter of 
 course, " no delegate will be sent " by that Catholic Tower. 
 By way of complement to what we said last week, the 
 Constitutional of a few days ago gives further utterance to 
 the official mind of France. It is all for the best of the 
 Council that the Emperor does not mean to send a repre- 
 sentative. The relations between Church and State in 
 France, it says, are very well settled by the Concordat. A 
 delegate would tempt the assembled Fathers into the erro- 
 neous belief either that the Government wished to interfere 
 in the discussion of dogmas which do not concern it in the 
 least, or, on the other hand, that it admitted the right of 
 the Council to discuss " matters belonging exclusively to the 
 secular Government." These are very hard words to bear 
 all the harder, as they are universally admitted to represent 
 the views of the firstborn son of the Church himself. And 
 the answer given to them by the official Bomau press is 
 wofully deficient in strength. Governments should send 
 their delegates, it says, in order that these may tell them 
 " what the Council considers to be the duties of Govern-
 
 220 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 ments towards their subjects." "But they will have to 
 learn that lesson yet, sooner or later," it adds mysteriously. 
 
 Nor should, among the latest official utterances, that of 
 Switzerland be omitted. These sons of the Alps have a 
 diplomatic way of their own. Count Hohenlohe, having 
 proposed that they should join in preventive measures 
 against the resolutions of the Council, they reply, somewhat 
 curtly, that they did not see any reason for doing so ; they 
 had nothing to do with any deliberations ; but if the resolu- 
 tions of the Council should trench upon any of the religious 
 rights of their citizens, or in any way tend to a breach of 
 the peace, then the clerical dignitaries were very well ac- 
 quainted with the Federal Constitution and the legal means 
 it provides against any such illegal attempts. Alas! Will 
 no one interfere ? Shall the pathetically expressed " expec- 
 tations" of the general meeting of the Catholic Leagues of 
 Germany " that both the k Governnients and the Princes will 
 refrain from taking any steps which might disturb the 
 liberty of these deliberations on the part of the Council," be 
 so literally fulfilled? Where is the time when the position 
 of worldly dignitaries at these Councils was matter of gravest 
 import? And where, too, are the days when Emperors said, 
 as did Constant ine the Great with regard to the Council of 
 Nicaja, " What has seemed good unto three hundred holy 
 Bishops is not otherwise to be considered than the sentence 
 of God's only Son." Time was when the question whether 
 these Councils were divinely or humanly set was very hotly 
 contested. Before the Fathers of Trent it was very elo- 
 quently proved how that these assemblies were the distinct 
 counterparts of certain other Councils such as that of the 
 angels in Job, or of the Trinity itself ; not to mention those 
 of Sichem, of " Pope " Eleazar, and Joshua, of Zadok and 
 Abiathar, and so forth. But, by way of compromise, the 
 middle course of styling them " apostolical " came to be 
 adopted, because the Synod of Jerusalem, in 52 a.d., when 
 " the Apostles and the Elders came together for to consider " 
 a certain grave matter which had caused " no small dis- 
 sension and disputation " at Antioch, is taken to be the first 

 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 221 
 
 authoritative Council of the Church. It followed that the 
 words used on that occasion, " for it seemed good to the Holy 
 Ghost and to us," were with some variations adopted by 
 those Synods that came after. Thus Cyprian writes to Pope 
 Cornelius, — " It has pleased unto us at the suggestion of the 
 Holy Ghost (suggerente)." The Synod of Aries says, — " It 
 has, therefore, pleased unto us, in the presence of the Holy 
 Ghost and his Angels." No wonder that Gregory the Great 
 placed the authority of the four first Councils on the same 
 level with the four Gospels. 
 
 Another question seems settled now. If Church historians 
 are not agreed on the point with whom the convocation of 
 General Synods lies — the worldly or ecclesiastical Powers — 
 this chilling indifference on the part of the former sets that 
 point at rest. As a matter of fact, however, the first eight 
 Councils have been convoked by Emperors, either at the 
 supplication of the Popes, or the Popes were asked to send 
 their Legates. It is equally beyond dispute that in some of 
 these Councils the Emperors presided " irpo^ ev/coafAiav " — 
 " for the sake of good order " — as the documents of the fifth 
 Council have it. Alas ! neither Napoleon, nor Francis 
 Joseph, nor Victor Emmanuel — not even Isabella of Spain, 
 will claim precedence of seat or vote this time. Which 
 reminds us that ecclesiastical ladies did take part in Synods, 
 notably in England. At the Synod of Whitby in 664, 
 where such questions as the tonsure, &c, were discussed, 
 Abbess Hilda took her proper seat, as did somewhat later 
 Abbess iElfleda at the Synod held on the Neith river in 
 Nort hurnb erlan d . 
 
 " Speech is silver, silence is gold," says the Eastern 
 proverb. If the Powers» offend by their reticence and dis- 
 cretion, two documents which have appeared in print since 
 our last article will offend more by their utterance, though 
 even they contain more between the lines than within them. 
 We mean, in the first instance, the answer given by the 
 theological faculty of Munich, the substance of which Ave 
 gave last week. Secondly, the pastoral letter issued by the 
 Bishops at Fulda assembled, previous to their departure
 
 222 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 to the Council. The theologians of Munich are already 
 declared to have rmt themselves in open antagonism to the 
 Church. They are accused of attempting to bring the 
 worldly arm and influence of the State to bear upon the de- 
 liberations of the Church, and of standing out in appalling 
 contrast to the unanimous declaration of the Bishops assem- 
 bled in Rome in 18G7. These, 500 in number, had entirely 
 and unconditionally, and with " one mouth and one heart," 
 agreed to everything the Pope had said, affirmative or 
 negative ; they adopted what he adopted, they rejected what 
 he rejected ; while these German professors dare to hint 
 that Pater Schrader — he, the official exegete of the Syllabus 
 — has not well understood certain theses of this document, 
 because its promulgation in the shape which he gave it- 
 would be fraught with grave perils. Still worse, perhaps, is 
 the apparently loyal declaration of the Bishops of Fulda. 
 who, assembled at the tomb of St. Boniface, address their 
 dioceses on the subject of the Council. " They do not," they 
 say, " think that this Council will be a magic cure for all 
 ills and dangers, and that it will change at once the face of 
 the earth ;" they only look upon it as a means of further 
 opening up " the gates of Divine truth and wisdom." As 
 regards, however, the fears that even among faithful mem- 
 bers of the Council have found expression, they wish to 
 remind them that — 
 
 "Never and never shall and can a General Council establish a dogma 
 not contained in Scripture or in the Apostolical Traditions. . . . Never 
 and never shall and can a General Council proclaim doctrines in contra- 
 diction to the principles of justice, to the right of the State and its autho- 
 rities, to culture (Gesittung), and the true interests of science ( Wissenschoft) 
 or to the legitimate freedom and wellbeing of nations. . . . Neither need 
 any one fear that the General Council will thoughtlessly and hastily frame 
 resolutions which needlessly would put it in antagonism to existing circum- 
 stances, and to the wants of the present times ; or that it would, in the 
 manner of enthusiasts, endeavour to transplant into the present times 
 views, customs, and institutions of times gone by/' 
 
 In reply, finally, to the insinuation that there would not 
 be the fullest liberty of debate, they say : — 
 
 "The Bishops of the Catholic Church will never and never forget at the
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 223 
 
 General Council, en this most important occasion of their office and call- 
 ing, the holiest of their duties, the duty of bearing testimony to truth ; 
 they will, remembering the Apostolic word, that he who desires to please 
 men is not the servant of Christ, remembering the account which they will 
 soon have to give before the throne of the Divine Judge, know no other 
 line of conduct but that dictated by their faith and their conscience." 
 
 There is a very peculiar ring in these words. This is not 
 the voice of the Civilta, neither of that Ultramontane party 
 in Germany whose organ are the Laacher-Stimmen ; neither 
 is it Liberal Catholic Germany which speaks through these 
 Bishops — that Germany which, deeply devoted to the Church 
 though it be, distinguishes carefully between it and Papacy, 
 and which finds utterance in the Allgemeine-Zeitung. We 
 wonder how these Bishops will discuss the paragraphs of the 
 Syllabus. But when, in another place, they innocently hold 
 that " the Church contains within itself the most varied 
 communities, corporations, and phases of religious life, that 
 it tolerates, nay protects, the differences of theoretical and 
 practical opinions," they seem to have forgotten much. 
 Shall it be ours to remind them of a certain institution 
 called the Index? Let us trust that the general loyal 
 tenour of this their pastoral letter will make the powers that 
 be overlook those black spots, as they did with Eusebiuss 
 Chronicle and Church History, which escaped condemnation 
 in the very first Index ever compiled, only through the 
 several instructive notes contained in it. 
 
 The Index : it has been rather busy again of late, though 
 it does take its time, and authors dead and gone for a gene- 
 ration may be summoned bodily to appear and defend their 
 misdeeds ; or they may live, like Dumas pere, and, having 
 for thirty years or so been translated into all the languages 
 of the world, watch the effect of the interdict upon the 
 lending libraries. But it would really not be very difficult 
 to find reasons why both these aforesaid documents should 
 not be placed upon that list, whether on account of a sen- 
 tentia erronea, or hseresi proximo,, of a sententia de hseresi 
 suspecta, hseresim sapiens (the smell of heresy !), or of one 
 "male sonans " of a sentence offensive to pious ears, or one
 
 224 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 l> seandalosa," " secliiiom" or " temeraria ;" for it is by these 
 canons that the critics of the Vatican review books, and in 
 the good old times the matter might be of some consequence 
 even to the life and limb of their authors. 
 
 The Council of Trent had a good deal to say on this Index 
 question, and we are not sure that the new Council may not 
 find it among the minor work now being prepared for them 
 by the congregations. The origin of the whole institution 
 has been found by some in the Acts — in Paul's exorcising 
 the spirit of divination within that certain damsel " which 
 brought her masters much gain by soothsaying." As early 
 as 325 the Fathers of Nica3a prohibited Arius's " Thalia," 
 and the first prototype of all future Indices was prepared by 
 a Council under Gelasius. True, the printed Acts of the 
 Councils speak of this Index as dating of 494, but, con- 
 sidering that it contains a work by Sedulius which did not 
 appear till 495, the last year of Gelasius must be assumed to 
 be the right one, more especially as all other conjectures do 
 not hold water. The decree in question, " Be libris recipi- 
 endis" itself does by no means contain the prohibited books 
 only. On the contrary, it first gives the Biblical canon, as 
 first fixed at the Synod of Hippo, in 393. It next fixes the 
 respective ranks of the Churches — to wit, Eome, Alexandria, 
 Antioch. And the opinion held in the old and later Church 
 that Peter and Paul had suffered on different days under 
 Nero is declared heretical. Next come the Councils recog- 
 nised by the Church, Nicrea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. The 
 fourth division is devoted to the enumeration of the patristic 
 works approved or partly approved. To the latter belong 
 the Acts of the Martyrs, which are not read in the Church 
 because their authors are partly not known, partly heretics, 
 and would cause offence among the ignorant and unbelievers. 
 Origen is only partly to be read, inasmuch as he is approved 
 by Jerome ; the rest, together with their authors, are to be 
 disapproved (renuenda). Eusebius, as we mentioned above, 
 is to be tolerated, though he has been rather lukewarm in 
 the first book of his relation, and though he has written a 
 book in defence of schismatic Origen. But he has made 

 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 225 
 
 many instructive notes. The fifth division condemns un- 
 exceptionally a number of so-called " apocryphal " books of 
 " of era spuria" of " heretical " books, or books the authors 
 of which were in the odour of heresy, certain Acts of Synods 
 — which have thus unfortunately perished — many Aets of 
 Apostles and Evangels, and among these not only the Pastor 
 Hernias, but that very book upon which the dogma to be 
 promulgated by the forthcoming Council is based — the Liber 
 Transitus (assumpiio) S. Marite. Other works condemned 
 are the writings of Tertullian, Lactantius, Africanus, Mon- 
 tanus, &c, as well as the correspondence between Christ and 
 Abgar and all phylacteries and writings of heretics from 
 Simon Magus to Acacius of Constantinople. Many are the 
 various readings in the different codices of this decree, and 
 Avild and hot have been and are the battles of the learned on 
 the subject. But in the main the points at issue do not 
 alter the facts here enumerated. On this book of the 
 Assumption we shall speak anon. Meanwhile we will follow 
 in its outlines the history of this censorial movement. As 
 long as literature was a thing of clerks and scribes, who, 
 however fast they copied, could easily be checked, the 
 Church was safe. With the invention of printing, however, 
 the matter began to assume a serious aspect, and though it 
 was styled of the Devil and the " black art " in general, 
 it throve amain. The printing presses were, therefore, placed 
 under ecclesiastical supervision. No book was allowed to be 
 printed without express permission of the episcopal bench, 
 on peril of excommunication, of a fine of a hundred ducats, 
 the public burning of the work in question, and the ruin of 
 printer and publisher generally. But when at the time 
 of the Reformation the number of pamphlets, and treatises, 
 and sermons, and letters, and theses became " even as a 
 flood," this simple control proved of no avail and proper 
 Indices were printed. These contained the works prohibited, 
 the inquisitorial decrees, the names of heretics, whether they 
 had published anything or not, the names of printers who 
 had once issued some heretical work, and whose future 
 books, whatever their contents might be, were therefore 
 
 Q
 
 226 FIVE LETTERS OX 
 
 prohibited once for all. Flanders, France, Spain saw the 
 birth of the first of these productions. Gradually the thing 
 assumed an official character, and Paul IV. is glorified as 
 the first summus censor librorum orbis terrarum. Editions of 
 this official document appeared in Eome in 1549, in 1557, 
 in 1559, and Pius V. handed the whole matter over to the 
 Council of Trent. The Council of Trent did not seem to 
 care much for this business, the less as many grave voices 
 made themselves heard in its midst — how that this was not 
 their proper work, but belonged to a learned academy ; 
 further, since " the Index as it lay before them comprised 
 both good and bad books ; " and finally a committee was 
 nominated which laid down ten rules, and from want of time 
 — the Council sitting only about twenty years — handed the 
 matter back to the Papal Chair. From that time dates the 
 Sancta Congregatio Indicts Librorum Prohibitorum. Insti- 
 tuted by Paul V., it received its constitution by Sixtus V. 
 Every now and then a new edition was published, with 
 additions. The one published in 1664 under Alexander 
 VII., comprises the decree of the 5th of March, 1616, con- 
 demning Copernicus, " de revolutionibus orbium," and that 
 of the 23rd of August, 1634, on Galileo's Dialogue. And 
 ever since it has continued its labours with grim rigour, in 
 spite of Benedict XIV.'s somewhat milder regulations, and 
 some of its latest decrees w f ere directed against the moderate 
 German philosopher and theologian Gunther — decrees which 
 have hastened the crisis in Germany. 
 
 One of the questions put before the Theological Faculty 
 of Munich turned upon the point whether a Papal ex cathedra 
 utterance was or was not binding as such upon every Chris- 
 tian's conscience? And the professors confessed not to 
 know what an ex cathedra utterance of the Pope meant. 
 There are no criteria, they say, whereby to recognize the 
 same. There are, they allege, no less than twenty different 
 hypotheses on the conditions requisite for a like ex cathedra 
 decision. " And perhaps the Council will wisely decide that 
 point, together with the Infallibility" — they conclude. This 
 ex cathedra has indeed been a puzzle to many within and
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 227 
 
 without the Church. A distinction is made between the 
 utterances of the Pope as " Doctor Privatus " and as " Doctor 
 Ecclesias" but no one knows when he speaks as one or as the 
 other. All that is required, or rather presupposed, by the 
 Church is that, when speaking ex cathedra, he should have 
 consulted some one first, should have gravely pondered over 
 the matter in hand, should have prayed that God might 
 enlighten him. But even if he had not done so it cannot 
 alter his decision, for, say the ecclesiastical authorities, this 
 would open the doors to all manner of doubt and heresy, 
 since any decision of his might be put aside on the plea that 
 he had not sufficiently pondered over the matter. And, as a 
 matter of fact, the Church has put aside many an undoubted 
 ex cathedra and " doctor ecclesise " decision, such as Innocent 
 III.'s decree that all the ceremonial laws of the Deuteronomy 
 are binding for the Church, since Deuteronomy means the 
 second law, and the second law could only mean the second 
 Church, which is Christianity; or, to go a little further back, 
 as Vigilius' decision on another literary production, the 
 writings of the three theologians, Theodore, Theodoretus, 
 and Ibas, suspected of Nestorianism. In 546 he declared 
 them to be orthodox, in 547 he pronounced them to be 
 .heterodox, and in 553 again declared them orthodox, whereby 
 he offended the fifth (Ecumenical Council at Constantinople, 
 convoked by Justinian, which, as he defended his views by 
 the " Constitution," broke off all Church communication 
 with him. Whereupon he recanted personally, saying that 
 he had hitherto in his opposition to the Council and its 
 views been the instrument of Satan. He died, however, on 
 his way back to Home. 
 
 But this question belongs rather to the chapter of the 
 *' Infallibility " and its historical progress. "We have only 
 turned to it here by way of digression on the ex, cathedra. 
 And well observes an old write]', Ebermann, that, on the 
 whole, though there may be occasionally a weak or ignorant 
 Pope, yet his words must be considered binding in all ways, 
 since it is not so much he who speaks, but that through him 
 speaks He who before now has spoken through the mouth 
 
 Q 2
 
 228 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 even of a she ass — " qui novit etiam per asinam loquentem 
 dirigere iter nostrum." 
 
 We *hall speak now of the most innocuous of new dogmas 
 to be inaugurated by the Council, that of the Assumption of 
 the Virgin Mary. We have mentioned already that the 
 fundamental work in question stands on the first Index of 
 Gelasius. And as late as the ninth century, Usuard's "Mar- 
 tyrologium ' says, under the heading " Dormitio Scmctse Dei 
 Genitrkis Maria?" that although her body, that venerable 
 temple of the Holy Ghost, was hidden by the Divine 
 Council, yet the sobriety of the Church had preferred pious 
 ignorance (cum pietate nescire) to teaching aught frivolous 
 or apocryphal on the subject. There are a number of 
 versions of the legend thus condemned extant in Greek, in 
 Latin, in Arabic, in Syriac, being more or less translations of 
 each other. The story is by no means bereft of a certain 
 poetical fervour, though some of its features belong to other 
 Greek and Aramaic legends, notably that cycle of sagas of 
 the Assumption of Moses, to which Jude alludes in his 
 Epistle. As authors of the Greek and Latin respectively 
 are mentioned John the Apostle and Bishop Melito, of 
 Sardis; the latter directing his version principally against 
 one Leucius. Thorny are the critical questions which beset 
 even this little tale ; but for them we must refer our readers 
 to the proper folios, or octavos, as the Arabic, the Syriac,. 
 the Greek, and the Latin have all been edited within the 
 last fifteen years or so, some even for the first time. And 
 these are the outlines of the legend. 
 
 Two years after the ascension of Christ (but even here, at 
 the outset, we are met by discrepancies as to date in the 
 various versions) an angel appeared to the Virgin, bearing a 
 palm branch, saying, " Hail, Mary, full of Grace, God is 
 with thee. On the third day from this thine assumption 
 shall come to pass, thy Son expects thee in the midst of the 
 angels/' And she begged that all the Apostles might be 
 summoned near her. The angel promised it and departed 
 amid great radiance. And all of a sudden, wherever the 
 Apostles were, even to the ends of the earth, John in
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 229 
 
 Ephesus, and Simon in Rome, and Paul in Tiberias, and 
 Thomas in India, and Matthew in Berytus, and Bartholomew 
 in Armenia, &c, they were lifted up by a cloud and brought 
 to the door of Mary. And when they had all prayed there 
 arose at the third hour of the third day a great commotion 
 and earthquake, and Christ descended in a cloud with hosts 
 of Angels, and Michael took Mary's soul into Paradise. 
 Next the Apostles Avent to bury the body, while a great 
 light shone around them, singing " When Israel went forth 
 from Egypt." But while they went to the valley of Jeho- 
 shajmat a certain Jew came out of the town and began to 
 abuse them and to take hold of the bier, whereupon his 
 hands clung to it and he could not remove them, suffering 
 great agonies, while the Angels in the clouds struck the 
 people with blindness. He is then converted, seeing the 
 miracle and having kissed the bier is healed, and the palm 
 branch is given to him that he might remove the blindness 
 from the eyes of the people, and when they had buried her 
 and closed the vault, Christ appeared again and asked the 
 Apostles what they thought he ought to do for the Virgin. 
 Whereupon they counselled him that as He had taken her 
 soul He should also take her body. And this was done. 
 Michael rolled the stone from the mouth of the tomb and 
 Mary sprang forth and blessed the Lord, and He kissed her ; 
 and as she rose Heavenwards she threw her girdle down to 
 !St. Thomas, who had been saying Mass in India, and who 
 had suddenly been transported to Mount Olivet. He kissed 
 it and took it to the Apostles, who were still assembled at 
 her now empty tomb. They would not at first believe that 
 he had seen her rise to Heaven, but when they saw the 
 girdle they were convinced. Then the same cloud which 
 had carried the Apostles from their different places took 
 them up again and transported them to their different places, 
 " even as Abacuc, the prophet, carried the food to Daniel in 
 the lions' den and was carried back to Judaea." 
 
 One MS. concludes thus, after stating that the author was 
 " Joseph, who placed the body of Christ in my sepulchre and 
 have seen and spoken with Him after His resurrection," —
 
 230 FIVE LETTEES OX 
 
 " and let every Christian know that he who has this book by 
 him or in his house, whether lie be an ecclesiastic, or a lay- 
 man, or a woman, the Devil will not hurt him, his son will 
 not be a lunatic, or a demoniac, or deaf, or blind. In his 
 house there will be no sudden death. Whosoever shall read 
 this sermon shall be saved." 
 
 And this is the basis of the dogma of the Assumption, to 
 be solemnly proclaimed, if all goes well, perchance yet in 
 this year of grace, 1869, as one of the means to restore 
 universal peace and goodwill among men, and to remove all 
 evils " both from the Church and the world." And still the 
 world stands aside, silent, preferring its evils, but marvelling 
 greatly. 
 
 October 5, 1869. 
 
 " Eritis sicut Beus — " "and ye shall be like unto God, 
 knowing good and evil." . . . Here is the dogma of the 
 Infallibility, worded very precisely. We know who first laid 
 it down and what ensued. If we are not mistaken, it is 
 Mepkisto also who, in the guise of Faust, inscribes these 
 words into the album of the young student. 
 
 There is a peculiar fascination to our minds in this dogma. 
 The most repulsive, the most humiliating though it be to all 
 human dignity, there is yet a something about it which 
 arouses a morbid curiosity. The very boldness with which 
 for the last five or six hundred years — for full thirteen 
 Christian centuries no one dared even to hint at a like 
 notion — it has ever and anon lifted up its face among men ; 
 that boldness with which, at this hour, with all that has 
 gone before of Borne and its Popes, it claims public re- 
 cognition, endows it with a weird interest. And its manifold 
 stages as well as thu means by which it grew do, indeed, 
 form a rare chapter in the history, not merely of Eome, but 
 of all mankind. 
 
 But we must forbear, for the present, to speak of it. We 
 shall rather turn to the manifold signs and sounds around us, 
 sounds not very unlike those that issue startlingly and 
 abruptly, and not without casual admixtures of grotesqueness,
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 231 
 
 from a tuning orchestra. And first of all there is that 
 Papal despatch to "Dr. Camming of Scotland, — Care of 
 Archbishop Manning " — which has arrived since our last. 
 There is a blushing coyness displayed in it with regard to 
 this same Infallibility, even as that of a bride before the 
 happy day. In one place it is the "opinion held by the 
 Church as to the infallibility of its judgment ;" in another, 
 '•' we thereby signified that the primacy, both of honour and 
 of jurisdiction, which was conferred upon Peter and his 
 successors by the Founder of the Church, is placed beyond 
 the hazard of disputation? Turn we, however, to another 
 passage of a more instructive nature in this letter. " No 
 room can be given at the Council for the defence of errors 
 which have already been condemned." Does this mean that 
 Councils do not reopen questions settled by other Councils, 
 notably questions on " errors condemned " by them ? Our 
 readers are acquainted, no doubt, with that famous work of 
 Pseudo-Isidorus, — those hundred and odd forged decretals 
 and synodal acts, which ever since Pope Nicolas I. have 
 worked such terrible mischief, and which now are con- 
 demned by the Church itself. Can it be that a new history 
 of all the Councils has been prepared by those cardinals and 
 professors now so busy in the Vatican in usum Delphinorum ? 
 If not, we fail to see the force of the statement. Or does it 
 mean that there will be no time for discussion — that there is 
 still alive in the Vatican that fondly-cherished hope of 
 making this Council, "like unto that of Chalcedon" — i.e., 
 of three weeks' duration? Convoked by the Emperor 
 Marcian, and subsequently approved by Leo I., that Council 
 sat from the 8th October to the 1st of November, and the 
 assembled prelates worked so hard approving the ready- 
 made canons (the number of which was at once disputed) 
 that they could have put both our Houses of Parliament, of 
 Convocation, nay, even the Ritual Commission, to the blush. 
 In 14 (or 13) days they held no less than about 21 sittings. 
 But, unfortunately, of all the manifold meetings of this 
 CEcumenical Council icar e^oxw, only the first six were 
 subsequently allowed to have been cecumenical, and it has
 
 232 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 been deemed expedient to preserve a record of them 
 alone in the oldest MSS. of the Synodal Acts. Worse still, 
 this great prototype of the coming Council ended by the 
 Papal Legate Lucentius uttering a protest " against what 
 had been decided upon contrary to the canons, and he would 
 go and tell it to his master, the Apostolic Bishop, so as to 
 enable him to come to a decision with regard to the insult 
 thus offered to his own chair and the breaking of the canons." 
 And nobody cared. The protest was duly entered into the 
 protocol, and the Commissioners adjourned the meeting, 
 quietly remarking, " The decisions we have read the whole 
 Synod lias confirmed." The point in which the Council thus 
 set aside the Pope and his demands was neither more nor 
 less than the setting up of a " New Rome " — Constantinople 
 to wit. " To the chair of the Old Rome," says the twenty- 
 eighth Chalcedonian canon, " the Fathers have vouchsafed 
 certain prerogatives on account of its being an Imperial 
 residence, and on the same grounds have the 150 Bishops 
 here assembled vouchsafed the same privileges to New 
 Rome, which should, for the same reasons as the old, be 
 exalted in ecclesiastical matters even as the elder Imperial 
 Rome " — (" Kal ev toU iKK\rjaLaari,Kot<i fMeyaXvveadai 
 7rpdj/xacri '"). And this objectionable canon, which strikes at 
 the root of Roman supremacy, remained in force in spite of 
 Leo's loud and violent protest and threats, and breaking off 
 of communications, and the rest of it. Absit omen. Several 
 other vexatious things came to pass at that Council, among 
 them that trifling mishap which occurred in the sixteenth 
 sitting. When the Imperial Commissioners requested both 
 the Roman and the Greek Legates to substantiate their 
 claims, the Roman Legate, Paschasius, read out a translation 
 of the sixth Nicsean canon, with the little addition, " Quod 
 Ecclesia Eomana semper liabuit Pri7natum." AYhereupon, 
 say the Synodal Acts, the secretary of the Consistory, 
 Constantine, forthwith produced the Greek original, wherein 
 not a trace of those words was to be found. And the 
 Roman Legates were much confounded. How that passage 
 came to be there in the Latin document " none could ever
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 233 
 
 tell." Howbeit, is it not the only sudden <: various reading" 
 in the history of Roman documents. 
 
 No ; Chalcedon was not a happy precedent to go back to. 
 We do not say that either Paris, or Vienna, or Madrid is 
 very anxious just now to play " New Rome," — Council, Pope, 
 and all. We have repeatedly had to record their painful 
 indifference regarding all things connected with the Council ; 
 but there were better examples to choose from, we should 
 have thought. Why not take, for instance, the very first 
 (Ecumenical held at Rome, in 11*23, under Sixtus II., 
 whereof there are absolutely no contemporary accounts ? 
 On that occasion there were assembled nine hundred mem- 
 bers, that is to say, two Abbots to one Bishop, and its very 
 first canon starts proudly with the words : — " We prohibit by 
 the authority of the Apostolical See," — the Fathers as- 
 sembled being, so to say, nowhere. It was opened on the 
 18th of March, and on the 6th of April the Bull embodying 
 its work was already issued, signed by the Pope and the 
 Cardinals. There certainly was a little unpleasantness 
 mixed up with it too. The case of the Archbishop of Pisa, 
 to whom the Pope had first given the right of consecrating 
 Bishops, and whom he had subsequently deprived of it, had 
 been submitted to the Council by Calixtus, though, as he 
 said, " No mortal has a right to judge a decision of a Pope." 
 And when the judgment of the Council went — as a matter of 
 course — against the Archbishop, he threw his ring and his 
 crosier at the Pope's feet — " for which the Pope severely 
 reprimanded him." Or the very next (Ecumenical, 16 years 
 later, the second of the Lateran, might have been taken as a 
 pattern. Innocent II. opened that with an extraordinary 
 speech, likening his own Bishops to her who had received 
 ring and staff from Judah (Thamar). He next proceeded, 
 according to Harduin, to snatch the crosiers from the hands 
 of the Bishops of his rival, Petrus Leonis, and to tear 
 with his own sainted hands the pallia from their shoulders. 
 Among the other business of the session there was also 
 the excommunication of King Roger of Sicily ; while 
 Theobald of Canterbury was invested with the pallium, and
 
 234 FIVE LETTERS OX 
 
 the founder of Fulda — whence the Bishops lately issued their 
 manifesto — was canonized. These and a few other things 
 settled, the assembled fathers and passive witnesses through- 
 out were sent home. The (Ecumenical which followed, in 
 1179, held altogether three sittings, wherein no less than 
 27 decrees or capitula were discussed. On the debates the 
 records are absolutely silent — for the simple reason that 
 there were none. Its official title had already become 
 "Generale Concilium Summi Pontijicis." Some of its 
 canons are, by the way, instructive. 
 
 For example, in order "to obviate the further selling 
 of Church ornaments, for the purpose of covering the 
 expenses caused by episcopal visitations," it was ruled that 
 no Archbishop should henceforth go about with more than 
 forty to fifty horses, nor any Cardinal with more than twenty- 
 five ; a bishop was not to exceed the number of from twenty 
 to thirty, an Archdeacon from five to six, and Deans were 
 not to have more than two: which seems hard. Neither 
 should they bring hounds or falcons to their visitations. 
 Another canon rules that churches, Church benefices, and 
 the like should not be given away before they have become 
 vacant. By a third canon ecclesiastics of a higher degree 
 are to dismiss their concubines, and a cleric who frequents 
 nunneries " more than is necessary " shall be reprimanded by 
 his bishops, and eventually be deprived of his Church 
 benefice. The last but one canon, the one renewed in the 
 happy days of the Concordat in Austria, rules that neither 
 Jew nor Saracen shall keep Christian servants, and that 
 those who live in the same locality with a Jew or a Saracen 
 shall be excommunicated. But if history is silent as to 
 debates at this Council, it is a pleasure to learn, at leasts 
 that there were present two English, two Scotch, and one 
 Irish Bishop, Laurentius, who possessed three cows, and was 
 appointed Legate of Ireland. 
 
 We have digressed. We cannot help thinking that even 
 the Amen, as it was, and still is, expected from the Bishops,, 
 may be a long-drawn-out one. Church music knows of 
 certain compositions called Amen fugues, and many are
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 235 
 
 the ups and downs in these same performances. To return, 
 however, once more to the Pope's correspondence " towards " 
 our Scotch divine. There was just one little point which we 
 rather objected to. His Holiness had "seen from the 
 newspapers." Now, we know that his Holiness does not 
 disdain the noble pastime of billiards. If we may believe 
 trustworthy authority he is not a bad hand at it either. We 
 confess that it always gladdens our heart to think of his 
 Holiness, against whom personally we have nothing but the 
 tenderest feelings, beguiling an occasional hour in this 
 gently frolicsome manner. Some of his predecessors sought 
 their pleasures elsewhere. But " seeing from the news- 
 papers !" He does not even say in the Civilta, or in the 
 Tablet, or in the Westminster Gazette, but newspapers! It 
 seems to overthrow all one's notions. Holiness, Infallibility 
 itself, skimming a column of The Times between two strokes. 
 He really should not have said it. And if that Patriarch of 
 Constantinople irreverently refused to look at the Encyclical 
 because "it had already appeared in the public papers" his 
 case was different. Abbate Testa did not present himself 
 before him until many weeks after the Encyclical had been 
 in print. But a letter to Borne, even "from Scotland," 
 ought to have reached the Pope before the newspapers. But 
 let that pass. Let his Holiness cheerfully continue to read 
 his papers. His path is not altogether strewn with roses. 
 Hadrian IV. used to say that "the most miserable state on 
 earth was that of a Pope ; his throne was surrounded with 
 spikes on all sides ; his happiness was bitterness, and a 
 burden too heavy to bear, weighed his shoulders down even 
 to the ground :" — a woful utterance echoed by Nicolas V., 
 who added that " there was not a more miserable and un- 
 happy creature on earth than himself," and that also " there 
 was not a soul that would tell him the truth." More heart- 
 rending still is that bitter cry of Marcellus II., that he did 
 not see " how any Pope could ever be saved !" 
 
 The interval has brought us also the episode of Pere 
 Hyacinthe, the Carmelite superior, the pet of Notre Dame, 
 who " raises his protest " with no uncertain voice. He will
 
 236 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 not be gagged. A " Son of the Saints," he will not be " one 
 of the dumb dogs." He, too, appeals to the Council "as 
 a Christian and a priest, against those doctrines and those 
 practices which are called Roman, but which are not 
 Christian." If this Council should not have freedom of 
 deliberation, w r hich, he says, is " the essential character 
 of an (Ecumenical Council," he will " cry aloud to God and 
 to man to claim another, really assembled in the Holy 
 Spirit." He withdraws from the monastery, which is 
 changed for him into " a prison of the soul ;" he " rejects 
 the chains which he is offered ;" he appeals to Christ him- 
 self, even as Huss did. " Ad iuum, Domine Jesu, tribunal 
 appello." And what is the answer? Many words of hard 
 abuse, many sighs, many tokens also of applause, many 
 conjectures, and " It is said that the Reverend Father will be 
 excommunicated." 
 
 Excommunication — Inquisition — to us what do these 
 words mean ? Even to him what will they be ? But there 
 was a time when they did mean something worse than a 
 thousand deaths. We shall take an opportunity of recalling 
 these ghastly subjects to our readers, so that those who have 
 forgotten may remember and never again forget. If other 
 countries have, from " religious " motives, poured out 
 human blood like water, they have bitterly repented, and 
 they have as with one accord inscribed independence of re- 
 ligious opinion upon their banner. And Rome ? — She issues the 
 Syllabus. This Syllabus will not hurt a fly, but it proclaims 
 aloud that Rome has not changed, will not change, and 
 cannot change. Non possnmus. We have already expressed 
 our profound sympathy with Pere Hyacinthe, as we would 
 with any one who cried out from the depths of his soul. 
 But we confess that, though we see in him a champion 
 very different from many who have issued forth like himself 
 in single combat against Rome, we know not yet what he 
 means to do beyond leaving his convent. Will he arraign 
 the authorities that bade him revoke, before the Council ? 
 But he at once declares that he will not submit if judgment 
 goes against him. And, altogether, to talk of Hyacinthism
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 237 
 
 as some French organs already do, seems to us a little too 
 premature. Has he, beyond the wild cry caused by that 
 long Roman hand which laid itself with an iron grip around 
 his neck— has he a programme ? How far does he object to 
 Rome ? And what is the meaning of another Council to 
 which he will appeal ? Composed of whom ? How far does 
 he renounce, if he renounces them at all, those words of his 
 which we happen to have before us, contained in his Con- 
 ferences of 1866 ? — " Nous sommes les representants humains 
 de la souverainete divine sur les consciences. ... La 
 souverainete de Dieu, le Eoyaume de Dieu, c'est l'Eglise." 
 And again, in defining this Catholic system, he calls it, " Le 
 regne de Dieu sur les consciences ! . . . Nous sommes 
 les representants de Dieu. Le regne de Dieu existe ici-bas,. 
 organise, complet, vivant — c'est l'Eglise." If the Catholic 
 Church be " the reign of God over the consciences," we do 
 not quite see how he can object to its decrees. Nor does he 
 seem inclined to reject what he held before in any way. 
 Let us wait and see. We would neither underrate the 
 weight of his step nor expect too much. Meanwhile, we 
 cannot help congratulating the eloquent and bold friar that 
 he lives in the Paris of 1869 — though it be the year of the 
 Vatican Council. 
 
 And there is balm in Gilead, even in Munich. Two 
 professors have not shared in that well-known reply given by 
 the theological faculty of Munich. They answer by them- 
 selves. But we fear,. though this answer is intended as a 
 pre-eminently ultramontane manifesto, it will please Rome 
 even less than the other. It is a very long document, which 
 we have printed already, and the gist of which is best given 
 in its own words : — 
 
 " From this detailed reply to the five questions there follows the 
 dogmatic general result that an eventual sanctioning on the part of the 
 next (Ecumenical Council of the Syllabus as it lies before us, and a raising 
 into a dogma of the Infallibility of the Pope as speaking ex cathedra, would 
 not alter directly (unmittelbar) as such the present status quo between 
 Church and State, and would not carry with it as a doctrine binding upon 
 the conscience of every Christian the dogma of a divinely instituted sove- 
 reignty of the Pope over the Monarchs and the Governments. Nor would
 
 "238 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 the further doctrine of a divine origin of the personal and real immunities 
 of the clergy, not merely generally, but also in detail and purely as such, 
 produce any transforming influence upon school teaching as far as the rela- 
 tions between Church and State are concerned." 
 
 If our readers should find this not over easy to compre- 
 hend, we can assure them that it was far from easy to 
 translate — more especially as there is not a single full stop 
 in the whole paragraph. We had first to uncoil many a 
 weary noun and adjective and participle, and what we 
 believe are called " auxiliary sentences." But if both our 
 readers and ourselves may complain of this hard task, that of 
 the dissenting professors was harder still. No wonder they 
 took time. Their answer to Count Hohenlohe goes to show 
 in the main that with all the Infallibility of Church and 
 Pope, the decrees of Council would, as far as their practical 
 bearing is concerned, be mere official waste paper ; nay, not 
 even would the teachers of dogmatic theology be bound 
 to take notice of them. More especially as regards the 
 supremacy of the Pope over temporal Governments, they 
 argue (in reply to question two), that whether this supre- 
 macy be declared a " potestas direeta" or " potestas indirecta 
 in temporalia" it mattered absolutely nothing. Because 
 "such a dogma could not be laid down as binding to a 
 Christian conscience, but would ever remain matter of free 
 theological opinion, — even if it could be proved valid by 
 scientific arguments of the most profound and striking kind." 
 Speaking of the ex cathedra utterance of the Pope, they, too, 
 find it difficult to decide what constitutes a like " locutio" 
 and hope, as did the other professors, that this may be 
 settled by the " infallible " ecclesiastical office itself. As to 
 Father Schrader, the official framer of the Syllabus done 
 from the negative into the positive, he seems already 
 disavowed, thrown overboard, found wanting. There is not 
 one word of him. On the contrary, these two malcontent 
 professors always " assume that the paragraphs of this 
 Syllabus errorum (by a curious misprint the word terrorum 
 figures in our copy) should be rejected unchanged as they 
 are." But here comes a delightful piece of comfort. Even
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 239 
 
 if they be so rejected, in "Bausch unci Bogen," they argue 
 *" they would not for all that be rejected as heresies, at least 
 not in tato ; but there would be many different degrees 
 of censure attached to them, as, indeed, most of these para- 
 graphs have substantially already been condemned by the 
 •Church." They would only be as a Papal letter has already 
 styled them — " Propositions and doctrines respectively false, 
 audacious, scandalous, erroneous, injurious to the Holy See, 
 derogatory to its rights, subversive to the rule of the Church 
 and its divinity, schismatical, heretical, and contrary to the 
 Council of Trent." And, the document naively adds, has 
 not the Council of Constance called many of Wycliff's and 
 Huss's theses only sententise erronese, temerarite, se&itiossz" 
 •and has not Martin V. himself confirmed that mild judgment, 
 instead of calling them heretical ? Good Pope ! Most 
 lenient Council ! But did we not read somewhere that this 
 same benevolent Council burnt that man Huss alive ? And 
 were not, only the other day, vast multitudes gathered 
 together in that ancient city of Prague to do honour to the 
 memory of the " Saint and Martyr," some of whose opinions 
 had been declared " erroneous ?" Let these professors 
 beware ! They are uttering many sententias seditiosas ! 
 Neither does it seem very likely that the Vatican will smile 
 upon them for raking up, just at this moment, with the most 
 innocent air in the world, memories which it fain would 
 bury out of sight. In their German thoroughness — unless- 
 they be wolves in sheep's clothing — they go over a goodly 
 list of decrees on the part of Popes, backed by Councils, 
 against the temporal powers : — how Innocent deposed 
 Frederick II. in the Council of Lyons, by virtue of the 
 power of binding and loosing given to him by Christ — words 
 into the original meaning and purport of which we may enter 
 by-and-by ; how his subjects were declared free of their oath 
 of allegiance and their duty of obedience towards him both 
 as Emperor and King, and how the Excommimicatio latm 
 sententise was pronounced upon all those who should give 
 him any "advice, help, or favour." And, continue these 
 indiscreet advocates, did not the Council of Trent excommu-
 
 210 FIVE LETTERS OX 
 
 nicate all those — Emperors, Kings, Dukes, Princes, &c. — 
 who allowed duelling within their domain ? and were not 
 their cities, fortresses, or places bestowed upon thorn by the 
 Church, near which a duel should happen, forfeited ? — an 
 ecclesiastical fact which, for all tilings in the world, looks 
 very much like a special reminder to Napoleon III. and the 
 gallant journalists of the Second Empire. Indeed, they say, 
 if all those emanations against the temporal Powers, by 
 Gregory VII., by Urban II., by Lucius III., by Innocent III., 
 by Honorius III., by Gregory IX., by Paul IV., by Pius V., 
 in bulls, and decretals, and letters innumerable, have never, 
 even within the Church, unanimously been considered more 
 than " assertions " of a theoretical Divine right, they cannot 
 surely, neither they nor their like, be now made binding 
 either " de fide " or " theologically." True, the.first Gallican 
 paragraph which authoritatively embodies that view has been 
 styled " heretical " or hseresi proximo,, erronea. &c, but these 
 censures they hold are of a private nature, not ecclesiastically 
 authoritative: — even though Innocent XI. and Alexander 
 VIII. disapproved this Gallican constitution, and Pius VI. 
 called the paragraphs of it temerarias, scandalosas, injurias. 
 All this, they conclude, does not affect the teaching. There 
 are many different theories on the subject, and no decree 
 of the Council would make any difference in the interpreta- 
 tion and expounding of these and the like matters on the 
 part of Ecclesiastical Professors. Infallibility or not, ex 
 cathedra or not, Council or not, those things must and 
 will ever remain subjects " of free theological opinion." 
 
 This is the voice of the two Professors of Righteousness. 
 We were bidden to hold our hands until we had heard this 
 protest. We have heard it, and we think it more damaging 
 than either Fulda or Hyacinthe. But the Roman Press did 
 not see at first, and partly pretends still not to see, what 
 harm there is in the Fulda Manifesto. 
 
 These Germans ! Whenever they issued from their woods 
 they have always proved dangerous foes to Borne — from the 
 time of Varus to that of Luther. And now they advance 
 upon her, daring her with her own decretals : — those same
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 241 
 
 decretals over which, as Dante has it, the Pope and the 
 Cardinals have forgotten Gospel the Nazarene : — 
 
 " T Evangelic* e i Dottor ruagni 
 Son derelitti, e solo al Decretali 
 Si studia se, che pare a' lor vigagni. 
 A questo intende il Papa e i Cardinali 
 Non vanno i lor pensieri a Nazzarette 
 La dove Gabbriello aperse 1' ali." . . . 
 
 October 19, 1869. 
 
 By this time Pere Hyacinthe lies under the Excommuni- 
 catio latm sentential, coupled with the " mark of infamy." 
 Ten days the General of the Barefooted Carmelites gave him 
 to retract, " to raise himself generously, and to repair the 
 great scandal." He has not answered the solemn summons. 
 But, as the Gaulois informs us, M. Charles Loyson, ci-devant 
 Frere Hyacinthe, is about to start a newspaper, entitled The 
 Christian, Echo of Clerical Democracy. Another account 
 describes him as having departed for America. 
 
 We should, we confess, have liked to see an answer from 
 Hyacinthe to the letter of the General, who avers that lie 
 never dreamt of prohibiting Hyacinthe from preaching, 
 either at Notre Dame or any other church. On the contrary, 
 he told him to confine himself exclusively to the pulpit. 
 The strictures passed upon him referred to his speeches at 
 the Peace League and other public places. He writes : — 
 
 "You must know, Reverend Father, that I have never forbidden you 
 to preach, that I have never given you any order or imposed on you any 
 restrictions with regard to your sermons. ... If you have renounced a 
 reappearance in the pulpit of Notre Dame it is of your own free will that 
 you have renounced it, and not in virtue of any measures taken by me 
 towards you." 
 
 Extremely characteristic, by the way, is the manner in 
 which the Roman press treats the matter. In one instance, 
 it is " the fall of a leaf towards the autumn." The wind of 
 pride had dried it up, the frost of rebellion had chilled it 
 long ago, and now it has become detached from the living 
 
 E
 
 242 
 
 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 trunk, and has fluttered to the ground. And although the 
 master of the vineyard may mourn over it, lie cannot save 
 it. It must bo trodden under foot and its place will know 
 it no more. More dried leaves have fallen in their time, 
 and have gone to bury themselves in the mire. There was 
 Carlo Passaglia, there was Cristoforo Bonaviso, and Eusebio 
 Realli, a Lateran canon ; there were the Liverani, Bobone, 
 Perfetti, and dozens of others who fell away during the 
 Italian Revolution; there were the many Frenchmen of 
 great and little note, and among them Robert de Lamennais, 
 of whom Hyacinthe "possesses neither the talents, nor, as 
 yet, the sins/' And whether these rebels be dead or alive, 
 their end has been miserable beyond words, while Rome 
 lives, and will live, and the Church passes on from genera- 
 tion to generation. " Is Pius IX. less great, less powerful, 
 less formidable in consequence to his enemies? No, cer- 
 tainly not. All the harm has come to the leaves only." 
 
 But as if to balance these proud assertions, another " in- 
 spired " organ takes the other line — ad misericordiam. The 
 Rev. Father Hyacinthe says in his letter that he intends to 
 appeal to another Council from the decrees of the forth- 
 coming one, which, he has reason to believe, will not be 
 " free." And why, asks that organ, is the Council not to be 
 free ? " Who will intimidate it or bribe it ? " Pius IX., old, 
 feeble, poor Pius IX., who, so far from having to give any- 
 thing to his Bishops, has to rely on poor Peter's pence which 
 they are about to bring him ? " As to these poor contri- 
 butions, it may be observed, in passing, that the collections 
 are being pushed on with great vigour and enthusiasm, and 
 that, together with the mites expected from the Bishops, the 
 trifle of from four to five millions is hopefully and con- 
 fidently looked for at Rome. 
 
 Meanwhile, M. Loyson is not quite given up yet. Santa 
 Teresa is being particularly invoked to " stop him on the 
 brink of the precipice." And there is hope even for the 
 excommunicated. If they are beyond the pale, if no one 
 may eat with them or speak to them, they may become 
 Popes for all that. There was, e.g., Formosus, Bishop of 

 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 243 
 
 Porto, who, though excommunicated by Pope John VII., 
 followed Stephen V. on the Papal throne. Shall we digress 
 again ? He recalls an interesting episode in Church history, 
 one which bears most emphatically to our minds upon the 
 subject of Popes. It has also something to do with the 
 " Bulgarian question." 
 
 The Bulgarians, it seems, did not embrace Christianity till 
 the end of the ninth century, although, or because, they had 
 been in close connexion with the Byzantines for many gene- 
 rations. At last they were baptized. But their king, 
 Bogoris, soon found himself, in spite of all the instructions 
 of his Greek missionaries, even of the Bishop who had 
 baptized him, and given him the name of Michael, in a 
 hopeless state of puzzle and bewilderment. Not only did 
 his subjects object to the new faith and rise in rebellion 
 against both it and him, but he did not know what this his 
 new faith really consisted of. The many dogmas and cere- 
 monies preached to him and enforced upon him by the 
 shoals of teachers who now flocked into his dominions, each 
 bearing new, contradictory, and even heretical tenets, became 
 too much for him, and he despatched legates to the two 
 religious authorities of the time — the Emperor of Germany 
 and the Pope of Borne — to ask them for proper teachers. 
 But long before the clerical envoys of the Emperor of 
 Germany had reached Bulgaria, bearing vessels and gar- 
 ments and books, the Boman priests had already taken 
 possession of the length and the breadth of the land. Where- 
 fore the Germans more speedily returned than they had 
 come. One of those special legates sent by the Pope was 
 our Formosus, and he brought with him 106 chapters of 
 replies to the questions raised by these new believers. Let 
 us extract a few. 
 
 One of the first of these canons treats on the subject of 
 trousers. The Bulgarians may wear them, it says, both 
 they and their wives, as they please. Those who are drunk 
 may not go to the communion, but they who have bled from 
 their noses may. A woman may go to church on the very 
 day of her delivery if she likes. The books taken from the 
 
 E 2
 
 244 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 Saracens are to be destroyed. A husband is not to dismiss 
 his wife excepta causa fornieationis. It is not lawful to rest 
 from labour on Saturday; it can only be permitted on 
 Sunday. Bathing is allowed both on Wednesday, Friday, 
 and Sunday. The horse's tail on the top of the standard is 
 to be replaced by a cross. Criminals may be punished 
 except when they are clerics. No one is to pray for relations 
 who have died in a state of unbelief. The three patriarchal 
 sees founded by the Apostles are Borne, Alexandria, and 
 Antioch. The Bishops of Constantinople and of Jerusalem, 
 though called Patriarchs, have not the same authority, be- 
 cause the former was only established through princely 
 favour (they had evidently forgotten the Chalcedonian 
 Council at Rome), and the latter, the present Jerusalem, 
 is no longer the old one, which has been totally destroyed. 
 The law books which the legates have brought they have to 
 bring back again, " because you Bulgarians would not inter- 
 pret them properly. As to Christianity, about which you 
 want to know, since, as you say, you have Christians of all 
 kinds, Greeks, Armenians, and others, among you who teach 
 different things — the Roman Church has always ueen without 
 any stain and possessed of the true Christianity. My legates 
 and your future Bishop will always tell you what is to be 
 done in dubious cases — the last appeal lies with the Apo- 
 stolic chair." These and other things — also the gifts brought 
 by the legates — pleased King Michael so much that he, by 
 way of symbol, caught hold of his own hair and vowed him- 
 self and his subjects the perpetual servants of the Roman 
 Church. He then sent a second legation to Rome begging 
 that our Formosus, who had displayed great talent in this 
 mission, might be made Archbishop of Bulgaria. But they 
 knew better at Rome. He was not made Archbishop of 
 Bulgaria, under the plea that he had already a see of his 
 own and must not change. He was excommunicated instead 
 by Pope John YII., on account of these Bulgarian matters. 
 But another Pope came to the throne — Marinus, and he forth- 
 with removed his uninfallible predecessor's excommunication. 
 He passed away and another Pope also, and when Stephen V. 

 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 245 
 
 died Forraosus himself ascended the Holy Chair. Five 
 years later he was murdered, and was followed by Boniface 
 VI., who sat on the throne of St. Peter for exactly a fort- 
 night, and made room again for Stephen VI. 
 
 But we have not done with Formosus yet. By command 
 of the new Pope his corpse was taken from the tomb, dressed 
 in Pontifical garments, and bodily arraigned before a special 
 Council. A deacon was engaged for the defence, and the 
 charge ran " that the Pope Formosus had from criminal 
 ambition exchanged his episcopate Porto with the Chair of 
 Rome." The defence was considered non-valid, and the 
 dead man was solemnly condemned — the tribunal decreeing 
 that he was not a legitimate Pope, and that all his decrees 
 as well as all his ordinations were null and void. He was 
 thereupon deprived of his robes, the three fingers of his right 
 hand, wherewith the Papal blessing is given, were cut off, 
 and the mutilated corpse was thrown naked into the Tiber. 
 So that his former state of excommunication would have 
 been better than his latter state. True, Pope Stephen VI. 
 himself was dragged out of the church, thrown into a dark 
 prison, and strangled the very next year. He was followed 
 by Pope Romanus, who was murdered four months after- 
 wards, and was succeeded by Theodore, "the benevolent," 
 who was murdered twenty days afterwards, and was followed 
 by Sergius III., who was expelled, and was followed by John 
 IX. He held three Synods in two years, and died to make 
 room for Benedict IV., who was murdered three years later, 
 and was succeeded by Leo V. Four weeks afterwards he 
 was murdered by his chaplain Cristophorus, who became 
 Pope, and who six months later was thrown into prison and 
 killed there, and Sergius " the Antipope " ruled in his stead. 
 Here follows that famous epoch called the Pornocracy, 
 coupled with the names of Theodora the mother, and Ma- 
 rozzia and Theodora her daughters : even Marozzia, the 
 mother of Pope John XL, about whose father the eccle- 
 siastical writers may be consulted with advantage. Sergius, 
 " homo vitiorum omnium servus " — the slave of all the vices — 
 died soon under suspicious circumstances ; but he received a
 
 246 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 noble epitaph in the Vatican, on which lie was styled " the 
 good shepherd who had loved all his flock together," and 
 visitors were informed on it that in that place they would 
 behold the remains " both of the ' pious Sergius ' and of 
 Peter the Apostle." Next Anastasius III. came to the 
 throne, which he held for two years, and after him Laudo, 
 who ruled for half a year and eleven days. And after him 
 came John X., the favourite " nephew " of Theodora the 
 Elder. When he had been thrown into prison and murdered 
 Leo VI. was chosen. Six months afterwards he was followed 
 by Stephen VII. Two years later Marozzia's son, but twenty- 
 five years old, became Pope. But Marozzia's other son im- 
 prisoned both his mother and his brother the Pope, who 
 died in the third year of his imprisonment, and was followed 
 by Leo VII., who died two years afterwards. 
 
 But we really must stop — only that the history of the 
 Papacy is so very fascinating, replete on every page with 
 matter of quite thrilling interest. It has but one drawback. 
 There is so much blood. And its fumes mingled with those 
 of many ghastly revels, are apt to make the brains of us 
 poor fools of " civilization and progress " to reel and our 
 
 hearts to grow sick within us What were those words 
 
 the Archbishop of Westminster spoke the other day ? " I " 
 — the Pope — " claim to be the Supreme Judge and Director 
 of the consciences of men ; I am the sole last Supreme Judge 
 of what is right and wrong." Shall we answer this ? Let 
 that most horrible procession of murdering and murdered 
 Popes answer. Let him go into his own chamber and answer 
 himself. .... ''Sole last Supreme Judge?" Did it ever 
 strike him that Gregory the Great repudiated with horror 
 what he called the " blasphemous and criminal " title even 
 of " oecumenical patriarch ? " 
 
 But by the side of this all the other statements made by 
 his Eminence pale. Divorce, secular education, and religious 
 doubts are the foundations of civilization. The state of Rome 
 is the proof of the " Supernatural Society," for " piety, 
 morality, public order, true civilization, charity, courtesy, 
 justice, and goodwill." So be it. There is nothing like a
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 247 
 
 positive statement. As regards divorce, however, would it 
 not be wise if Dr. Manning, a theologian, were a little less 
 scathing and scornful about it ? He should remember that, 
 after all, it is a "Divine Institution," and to be found even 
 in the Vulgate, in spite of its many corrections and emenda- 
 tions of the text. But we shall not discuss these matters 
 with the Archbishop. He knows best, no doubt, what he 
 ought to say. Also, why it is England, of all countries in , 
 the world, which has been chosen as the special butt at this 
 moment. We do not mean the w r anton and absurd insult 
 expressly thrown in the face of London — bad as it may be — 
 as compared to Eome, that sink of sinks. What we mean is 
 the way in which this supreme sovereignty of the Pope 
 is flaunted in our face in preference to all other nations. 
 While in Germany, for instance, the official Eoman organs 
 deny as loudly as ever they can all and any desire on the 
 part of the Pope to set himself over worldly powers, we, in 
 England, are told that the " Prince on the throne and the 
 Legislature that makes laws for kingdoms" — both Queen 
 and Parliament — stand under the jurisdiction of this " Su- 
 preme Judge." In order to prove how remote a like thought 
 be from the Papal mind, the distinct disclaimer of Boniface 
 VIII. himself is adduced by other official Eoman writers and 
 speakers. Nay, they go so far as to quote the words of 
 Innocent III.'s Decretal " Novit" at the very outset of which 
 he protests that "no one should think of him as wishing 
 to diminish or disturb the jurisdiction of the King or his 
 power — he, the Pope, who cannot sufficiently exercise his 
 own jurisdiction, why should he wish to usurp another ? " — 
 and further, " Cum rex superiorem in temporibus minime recog- 
 noscat" In their zeal those apologists have, it is true, for- 
 gotten what else is to be found in Innocent's works. That he 
 is God's real representative in all things, vert Dei vere 
 Vicarius, is a phrase which occurs up and down in his letters. 
 And in his epistle to the Emperor of Constantinople he 
 proves to him that the " submitting " to kings or governors 
 which St. Peter enjoins upon all men (i. 2, 13, and 14) does 
 not include priests. Furthermore, he tells him, " Thou
 
 248 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 shouldst know that God created two lights in the firmament,, 
 the sun and the moon — that means, he created two dignities, 
 the Papal authority and the regal power. But the former, 
 which is set over the days, i. e., the spiritual things, is 
 greater ; that over the things of flesh is smaller, and there is 
 the same difference between Popes and Kings as there is 
 between the sun and the moon." Need we say that the 
 scholiasts have danced a mathematical jig on this passage? 
 The earth, they sa) 7 , is seven times bigger than the moon, 
 the sun is eight times bigger than the earth : ergo is the 
 Pontificate 47 (?) times bigger than royalty. This figure, 
 however, did not seem quite to suffice, and Laurentius 
 amends it by another arithmetical process into exactly 1,744 
 times, by which the Pontifical power surpasses that of royalty. 
 But not these and the like passages are chosen by the 
 spokesmen abroad. We are alone, it seems, to be favoured 
 with a barefaced and exaggerated revival of theories which 
 elsewhere are zealously hushed into silence. These theories 
 have before now been heard in this land of ours, and much 
 blood and many tears have been shed through them. Arc 
 the times deemed ripe in the Vatican ? Let these counsellors 
 beware. Rome has had to rue many a too hasty step, too 
 loud a cry, too defiant a challenge. 
 
 Converts are not always desirable acquisitions. We are 
 told that the Jews compassed sea and land to make one 
 proselyte. We are also told that they likened their converts 
 to a very objectionable and irritating bodily disease, and that 
 they did never quite trust them, even to the twenty-fifth 
 generation. The German reformation was ripened, if not 
 brought about, by the too zealous agitations of a Roman 
 convert. Among ourselves we have those who have been 
 pronounced " thorns in the side of their new mother." But 
 Archbishop Manning, we deem, has by this oration, sincerely 
 meant as no doubt it was, struck her a heavier blow than she 
 has received from either Fulda or Munich, Hyacinthe or the 
 Cabinets of Europe. Let him now go to Pome, that abode 
 of saintliness, and move, according to the programme, the
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 249* 
 
 dogma of the Infallibility. Let him receive Lis red hat — he 
 has well deserved it. 
 
 Eegarding that first reply of the Munich Faculty — not 
 the so-called Protest of the two Professors — there have been 
 some very bitter words in the Bavarian Press. It appears 
 that there has been a little shuffling. The official organ, in 
 publishing it, did not publish it at length. It preferred to 
 omit the very important introduction. Questioned on the 
 subject, it took refuge in a variety of replies — first, that the 
 introduction was of no consequence ; next, that it placed the 
 reply in a totally different light, and was, therefore, irrele- 
 vant, we presume. But the opponents were not to be 
 appeased. They wanted the introduction sans phrase. It, 
 too, has now been published. And here it is : — ■ 
 
 "In replying to some questions put before them by the Royal Bavarian. 
 Government regarding the forthcoming Council, the undersigned did not 
 think they were doing anything which ran counter to the good traditions 
 of former centuries. It is well known that the legates (oratores) of the 
 Catholic monarchs and States took a vivid interest in the Council of Trent. 
 These legates were furnished with carefully-weighed instructions referring 
 to subjects fixed or proposed for the debates of the Council, and not rarely 
 tried on their part to advance propositions or to influence the course of the 
 transactions and the framing of the final decisions. To this hour, it is 
 true, the Catholic Governments have not been invited yet to take part in 
 the Council, but it doubtless lies in the nature of the given circumstances 
 that they, too, should endeavour in good time to get clear on the point as 
 to what eventually should be their line of action in the face of resolutions 
 which, not merely possibly, but scarcely otherwise than necessarily, must 
 touch upon political ground. The history of the last Council of Trent 
 offers manifold proofs that precisely those monarchs who were most distin- 
 guished by religious zeal and devotion towards the Church had furnished 
 their legates with the most detailed instructions and orders. The under- 
 signed do not feel called upon to decide whether the cpiestions put before 
 them by the Government are the only possible ones, or even the most 
 prominent ones, that might be put under the given circumstances in this 
 exalted matter. But in answering them, as they do, according to their 
 best knowledge and conscience, they are penetrated by the vivid desire 
 that also thereby that harmony between Church and State may be fur- 
 thered which, at least as long and in as far as there exist Catholic Govern- 
 ments, should not be a mere ideal. As sons of the Catholic Church, the 
 undersigned preserve with their entire heart that devotion towards the 
 deliberating and deciding authorities of the future Council to which every 
 disturbing interference is absolutely foreign, and only because and inas-
 
 250 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 much as they would wish to sec the Church secured also in its outer 
 existence against the distinctive tendencies of impiety do they wish that 
 in every respect a real and clear understanding on the limits and points of 
 contact of the legal State with the order and task of the Church be either 
 preserved or the way he paved towards it." 
 
 What is most important and most formidable about this 
 prooemium is the fact of these Professors suggesting more 
 questions to be put and to be answered. They evidently like 
 their task. But, honest, learned, and involved as they are, 
 we think they have, on the whole, said enough for the 
 present. Let them rest on their laurels for a while. We 
 know their views, and so do the Bavarian Government and 
 the Vatican; and we cannot think without a shudder of 
 reading, translating, and inwardly digesting a few more 
 columns like unto the former. Meanwhile the Gallican 
 Church has sounded the war-note by no less a personage than 
 the Bishop of Sura (where is Sura? we have heard of a 
 Jewish Academy of this name ; is there to be a new "prince- 
 dom of the exile " ?) and Dean of the Theological Faculty of 
 Paris, Monseigneur Maret. He has written two volumes On 
 the General Council and the Pullie Peace, which he submits 
 to the Council. More are to follow, but these may suffice as 
 to the general tendency. In a circular letter to his brother 
 BishoxDS he refers them to the preface of the book, written, 
 he says, in the exercise of an episcopal right, and inspired by 
 love to the Church and the Holy See. He has dedicated 
 these two volumes to the Pope himself. In the letter 
 addressed to His Holiness he writes first to excuse himself 
 that he cannot himself be the bearer of his work, inspired, 
 he repeats also to him, by his episcopal duty. " At the 
 moment of the assembling of an (Ecumenical Council," he 
 proceeds, " which is called upon to perform such great tasks, 
 and foreseeing, as I do, the sinister consequences wherewith 
 projects might be fraught, conceived and proclaimed by 
 venerable men who, however, do not seem fully aware of the 
 perils of their undertaking — it appears to me both useful 
 and necessary to draw the picture of the constitution of the 
 Church in its greatness and perfection, and in that un-
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 251 
 
 changing character which its Divine Founder intended to 
 impart to it." He has published this book, he says, so that 
 •all may read it — the Pope, the Bishops, the priests, the 
 people, clerics as well as laymen. "I publish them before 
 the Council so that they all may have time to read them." 
 Briefly, the whole work, from beginning to end, is devoted to 
 one object — to the most fervent and unsparing fight against 
 the dogma of the Papal infallibility and to the defence of 
 Gallicanism. "In professing all the respect due to the 
 decisions and bulls of Sixtus IV., Alexander VIII., Clement 
 XI., Pius IV., we adhere to doctrines which appear to us 
 true." ' 
 
 If the Gallican constitution is called an arsenal, these 
 volumes are a powder-magazine. They are learned, being 
 the matured labour of many years ; they are eloquent, they 
 are daring. They, above all things, mean war — war to the 
 knife. And there is a peculiarly French note of fierce 
 sadness ringing out in the first lines, which contrasts very 
 strikingly with both the scorn and the satisfaction of our 
 "Westminster Archbishop : — 
 
 " After eighteen centuries of Christianity, what spectacle does the intel- 
 lectual and moral world offer? . . . The Christian religion is divided 
 into hostile and rival communities. In the midst of the highest culture, 
 <jf a brilliant civilization, philosophy shrinks from religion, science divorces 
 itself from faith, politics cannot direct men any longer towards then- 
 higher destinies, the noblest aspirations of our nature remain without any 
 fixed object, the human soul is floating at the mercy of the most contra- 
 dictory doctrines and tendencies." 
 
 "We shall have to return to this book again and again. 
 The Council begins to bear fruit already : such as has 
 probably not been foreseen. There will be a greater harvest 
 still, we ween, before it is all over. And all this time those 
 busy men of the Vatican work, work, work. And this is, 
 according to good information, their present procedure : — 
 The Pope, assisted by the leading Congregation of Cardinals, 
 works out the sketch of every single canon ; the Congregation 
 of Cardinals next sends it to the Congregation of the Six 
 Committees; the Cardinal who presides over these collects
 
 252 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 the votes, together with the motives, and returns them to the 
 ( 'animals' Congregation, which finally redacts the wording of 
 the canon and sends it, together with a precis of the votes, to 
 the secret press of the Quirinal. The volume thus gradually 
 forming is not to be shown to the Bishops before the day of 
 the Council, so that, it is said, not only the whole initiative 
 will remain in the hands of the Pope, but the Bishops will 
 not have too much time to prepare their eventual opposition. 
 But the Vatican has by this time become aware also of the 
 clouds that are gathering around, and it has in its wisdom 
 bethought itself of a counter-blast to all those jarring, pro- 
 fessional, episcopal, and journalistic voices. The plan of an 
 album has been conceived. Lists are circulating among the 
 "learned and educated" in which "any one who occupies 
 himself with profane or sacred science " shall subscribe in 
 advance a formula of submission to the decrees of the 
 Council. That it should be ours to tell it ! Even in Rome, 
 that ideal representative of the " supernatural," with all her 
 ecclesiastico-academical bodies aud schools and colleges, not 
 more than fifteen names could, as the Correspondance Havas 
 informs us, be gathered for this album. So that the intended 
 monster-folios will have to be reduced to a pocket edition, 
 and a very minute one, which is grievous. 
 
 Novembek 12, 18G9. 
 
 The Eastern proverb says, " Woe is me when I keep silent ; 
 woe is me when I speak." So long has the Vatican been 
 abused for apparently taking no notice of all the ominous 
 voices and tokens around, that it has at last broken its 
 Trappist vows. That " Moniteur of the Vatican," the "true 
 echo of the Holy chair": even the Civilta, has been autho- 
 rized to give a piece of the infallible mind to the world, 
 before the official hour has struck. But how golden was 
 that silence — how erudite, how eloquent, how honest com- 
 pared with that speech ! There are in the last two numbers 
 of that organ two emanations — Encyclicals in undress, as it 
 were. One treats of the Bishops of Fulda, another of the
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 253 
 
 positions of the Fathers in Council, and, by way of bonne- 
 houche, even the long - forgotten "Liberals of Bonn and 
 Coblentz" are passingly mentioned. To them, of course, 
 the answer was brief and obvious enough : — " Did they 
 imagine the Council would be without the Holy Ghost?" — 
 And nothing more need be said on that score. A Council 
 cannot err ; the Holy Ghost knows better than all the Pre- 
 lates — than even those of Coblentz and Bonn. Or do they 
 doubt it ? If so : Anathema ! — So far, so good. Next comes 
 Fulda. Here the answer was a little more difficult. But 
 Rome is up to the occasion. With all the hammering in 
 St. Peter's and debating in congregations and framing of 
 new Latin pronunciations and house-huntings for the saintly 
 guests and laying in of stores — even cigars, if rumour speaks 
 true — and the erection of monuments for events which have 
 not happened, and the gathering in of pence and collecting 
 of autographs, and all that feverish, festive bustle that keeps 
 the powers that be at work day and night : their right hand 
 has not forgotten its cunning. What the Civilta is made 
 (officially) to read out of that formidable Bishop's manifesto 
 is simply — " a victorious refutation of the liberal calumnies." 
 This Pastoral, it says, will clear up " all errors that may still 
 be floating in the public mind with regard to the Syllabus 
 and the Council." Do not these Bishops end with a wish 
 for the " Unity and harmony of the Church?" And what 
 but Liberalism produces division and schism in the Church ? 
 Has not His Holiness for this reason also condemned it in 
 the 80th thesis of the Syllabus ? Ergo, do the Fulda Bishops 
 in their manifesto show themselves good and true sons of the 
 Church by condemning so emphatically what the Pope has 
 condemned, viz. — Liberalism! — Q. e. d. Is there anything 
 in and out of the Epistolte Ohscurorum Virorum to be com- 
 pared to this reasoning ? We know it not. But what we do 
 know is that these Bishops will give their own explanation 
 in good time — if they can make themselves heard in Rome. 
 
 We think it was that delightful nation of the Lalenbiirger 
 who once built unto themselves a splendid Town-hall. And 
 when it was quite ready, and the solemn inaugural procession
 
 25 I FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 was forming, it struck one of the worthy burghers that a 
 trifle had been forgotten in that brave erection — the windows. 
 Whereupon they were advised to collect as much sunlight as 
 they could and carry it in in bags ; which they did. Twice 
 has tbe original plan of the Council-structure in St. Peter's 
 been altered, until at last everything was most satisfactorily 
 settled — throne, galleries, benches, curtains, and all, down to 
 the mosaics behind the Bishops' seats — when of a sudden it 
 occurred to an indiscreet questioner whether, as there was 
 to be some speaking in the Council, people would be able to 
 understand what the speakers said ? And, lo ! it was tried, 
 and it was found that not one syllable would be heard ; so 
 that, instead of the Tower of Babel which was expected, 
 there was to be a deaf and dumb asylum. And now, at the 
 twelfth hour, it has been decided to save appearances and 
 to accommodate the Fathers in another place. Lest, how- 
 ever, the enormous outlay might be supposed to be wasted, 
 these same Fathers will solemnly be marched in to the 
 original structure on the first day, and forthwith marched 
 out again. 
 
 Will they say much in that other place ? Or rather, will 
 what they do say be of the slightest consequence? Also 
 on this question — a very burning one — has the Vatican 
 spoken by the mouth of its own infallible echo. Not directly, 
 though, — there might be rocks ahead, — but in an " inspired" 
 letter to the Avenir National. And thus says the Civilta : — 
 
 " What is the Pope in relation to the Episcopate in Council assembled ? 
 As the successor of Peter, he is, according to Scripture, the comer-stonc 
 of the Church, the possessor of the keys of Heaven, the Shepherd of the 
 flock of Christ. According to the Council of Lyons, he is the guide of 
 the Universal Church ; according to that of Florence, he is the head, the 
 father, the master of all Christianity. . . . These arc the relations between 
 the Pope and the Church, whether the latter be considered in its isolated 
 and special groups or as a whole, in corpore or in Council. "What, then, 
 tell us these relations between Pope and Church in their special groups or 
 in Council ? Supreme authority and subjection — the former vested in the 
 Pope, the latter the part of the Assembly of the Bishops. . . . Not only 
 have the Popes, whenever they deemed it useful and proper, fixed the 
 term of the definitions, but they therewith combined the prohibition to 
 discuss or in any way (jaenomamento) to alter them! . . ."
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 255 
 
 This is clear enough. Professors of Munich, Bishops of 
 Fulda, Hyacinthe in America, Maret in Paris, Catholic world, 
 take notice ! No illusions, no compromise. The Pope has 
 to command, the Bishops "have a right" to obey — im- 
 plicitly. They may perchance be allowed to hold a con- 
 versation sotto voce, but as for discussing anything, how 
 dare they ! 
 
 We like this communique. It reads like an Encyclical ; 
 even with regard to its appeal to history, which it interprets 
 as it does the Fulda Manifesto : facts being of the slightest 
 possible consequence. And we cannot help further con- 
 gratulating ourselves that leaders or communiques in " Ephe- 
 merides " should begin to supersede Bulls. Here is a con- 
 cession to that progress of the age which it is " a damnable 
 error to suppose that the Pope could ever be reconciled 
 with." However fearful and wonderful the weapons where- 
 with these saintly journalists fight, we prefer it greatly to the 
 old familiar " Excommunicamus et Anathematizamus" 
 
 Or have they forgotten the Coena Domini ? Why, indeed, 
 use dead and rotten argument while there is a living Bull 
 at hand ? That question of the authority of a Council in 
 relation to the Pope has been settled long, long ago : — 
 
 " In the name of Almighty God, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy 
 Ghost, likewise through the authority of the Holy Apostles Peter and 
 Paul, and Our Own, do we excommunicate and anathematize .... all 
 and everyone, of whatever state, grade, and condition, — and even so do we 
 lay the interdict upon all such universities, colleges, and chapters which, 
 from our ordinances or mandates, or from those of the Roman Pope for 
 the time heing, should appeal to a forthcoming general Council " 
 
 Thus the second paragraph of that famous Bull, which 
 used to be read aloud, first three times, then once, a year 
 (on Maundy-Thursday or Coena Domini) by the Pope in the 
 presence of all the Cardinals, Archbishops, and Bishops in 
 pontifical garments, and in the presence of the vast concourse 
 of people who, from the ends of the earth, had flocked to Kome 
 for Apostolic absolution and blessing. After the reading, 
 these highest dignitaries of the Church threw their burning 
 tapers to the ground, trod them under foot, while the bells
 
 256 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 were tolled in an irregular and funereal fashion — to indicate 
 that by this excommunication the light and the grace of the 
 Holy Ghost were extinguished in the excommunicated, and 
 while the believers were called to church by the regular 
 and clear sounds of the bells, in puhatione ordinata, the 
 cursed ones were to be driven out and dispersed by those 
 vague and irregular " pulsations." The Bull was next affixed 
 each time to the doors of the principal churches of Home, 
 the Basilica of Peter and the Lateran Church, and most 
 horrible were its consequences. 
 
 It was well worth the time spent upon its composition, this 
 "Bulla Coznse" this famous Index of the "reserved cases" — 
 i.e., excommunications for crimes which only the Pope of 
 Rome himself could remove. The very first of these cases 
 dates from the Council of Clermont in 1130, where Inno- 
 cent II. reserved to himself alone the right of absolving 
 any one who had laid violent hands on a priest (Pereussio 
 Clerici). And by small degrees these cases increased in 
 number, until they reached the figure of about 110, of which 
 20 are embodied in this Bulla Ccenas. The framing of this 
 latter document took only about 300 years — from Urban V. 
 to Urban VIII. ; but what a document it is, and how inti- 
 mately it concerns us ! We gave the second paragraph 
 above ; here is its first : — ■ 
 
 " We Excommunicate ami Anathematize, ... all Hussites, Wycliflite.?, 
 Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists, (&c), as well as all and every heretic, 
 of whatsoever name or sect, as well as those who receive, protect, and 
 generally defend them, as well as such who knowingly read, keep, print 
 . . . their heretical or religious writings, ... as well as those schismatics 
 who withdraw themselves from the obedience of the Pope for the time 
 being." 
 
 Another paragraph treats of wreckers — an occupation to 
 which, it seems, not only Bishops whose sees bordered on the 
 shore were given, but the privilege of which was regularly 
 bestowed upon certain monasteries. When this amiable and 
 saintly practice was abrogated, a special exception was made 
 with regard to heretics and unbelievers, who, having escaped 
 the fury of the elements, were not to be spared therefore
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 257 
 
 by the servants of God. Another paragraph, enacts that no 
 one should be prevented from going to Eome. That means 
 that those Bishops who had hitherto been in the habit of 
 kidnapping, imprisoning, -wounding, ill-treating, and slaying 
 such abbots, or priests, or fellow Bishops who set out to 
 Borne for the purpose of lodging complaints against them 
 should do so no more. Thus, e.g., a wrathful Bishop of Bath 
 locked his dissatisfied clergy up in their own church, and 
 starved them into peaceful submission and the giving up of 
 their travelling plans. The Bishop of Waterford seized upon 
 the Bishop of Lismore on his way to Borne, threw him into 
 prison and chains, and, " having well beaten him," took pos- 
 session of his bishopric, even as did Archbishop Gaufrid 
 of York with his malcontents, who were going to tell Ce- 
 lestine III. And while Napoleon III., that good son of 
 the Church, places his own steamers, free of charge, at the 
 disposal of the Bishops Bomeward bound, the Emperor 
 Frederic II. had sent his illegitimate son Enzius, in 1241, 
 into the Pisan waters to attack the Prelates going to the 
 Council. He made, indeed, a great haul of legates and 
 Archbishops and Bishops and abbots on that occasion, and 
 lie carried them all in chains into Apulia. Philip IV., with 
 much less trouble, simply confiscated the goods of all those 
 Bishops who had gone to Borne in obedience to the call of 
 Boniface. In the next place there are solemnly cursed those 
 who in any way should molest ecclesiastics, or who should 
 appeal from Borne to the worldly Powers, who cite clerics 
 before a lay tribunal, who usurp clerical property, who levy 
 taxes on churches or convents, and — finally — do " we excom- 
 municate and anathematize all those who, by themselves 
 or others, directly or indirectly, under whatsoever title or 
 pretext, should presume to invade or occupy and hold the 
 Holy City, the kingdom of Sicily, the islands of Sardinia 
 and Corsica, the lands this side the Pharos, the Patrimony 
 of Peter in Tuscia, the Duchy of Spoleto, the Counties Ve- 
 naisin, Sabina, the Marches of Ancona, Avignon," and a vast 
 variety of counties, dukedoms, provinces, cities in and out of 
 Italy which, alas, have for many a long day since been so 
 
 s
 
 258 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 invaded, occupied, and held. It has indeed had strange 
 fates, this pet Bull, fostered by successive generations of 
 Popes. There was mystery about it from its very birth. 
 The Patriarchs, Archbishops, and Bishops would not pub- 
 licly proclaim it, some of the later Popes would not even 
 let it out of their hands, while the worldly Powers stamped 
 it out by common consent. Neither the Avisamenta nor 
 the Centum Gravamina of the German nation at the 
 Council of Constance even make mention of it. Philip II. 
 sent the Papal Nuncio, who came to proclaim it, out of 
 his empire, without hesitation. France, Portugal, and 
 Germany showed their contempt for it equally, and when 
 Clement XIII., forgetting that it was the latter half of the 
 18th century, excommunicated Duke Ferdinand of Parma 
 on the ground of this Bui], the days of Roman supremacy 
 were counted. France simply renewed the edict issued by 
 its Parliament in 1580, whereby all and any Bishops or 
 Archbishops who should make known this Bull would be 
 tried for high treason. Portugal promised to make an 
 example of anybody who should say a word in favour of this 
 Papal emanation, and that all or any judge who should as 
 much as mention it as a legal document should be treated 
 as a rebel against the King's person. A similar fate befell 
 it at the hands of Maria Theresa and the dukes and princes 
 and republics of Italy, until Clement XIV. wisely abrogated 
 the public reading of this Bull in church on the day after 
 which it was named, saying that " it was no longer a time 
 for Anathemas, but for Grace." Yet it has never been for- 
 mally revoked, though Joseph II. made it actually disappear 
 from the rituals, suggesting that the blank leaf should bear 
 the words " Obedientia melior quam vietima." 
 
 The Council of Florence and the Council of Lyons, for- 
 sooth ! Why not the Council of Chalcedon, too ? For it 
 is but the feeble echo of that feeble organ of German Ultra- 
 montanism, the Laacher-Stimmen, which is reproduced now, 
 years after the original, by the learned of the Vatican. Why 
 have they dropped that third Council there quoted, we 
 wonder ? And must we again freshen up their memory on
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 259 
 
 •one or two little points in ecclesiastical history ? Did they 
 ever hear of the Council of Constance ? It was there that 
 we were told the other day, a propos of the different degrees 
 of curse and condemnation attaching to opinions, that John 
 Huss was so leniently treated. Not all his sayings had been 
 accounted "heretical" — only a few. He certainly was burnt 
 on that occasion, but that was only for a few things he 
 held, not all. 
 
 That Council of Constance did many things. Among 
 others, it issued, in its fifth general sitting, as " Decrees of 
 the whole Synod," the following :■ — " 1. That this Synod, 
 properly assembled in the Holy Ghost, forming a General 
 Council of the Church Militant, derives its power directly 
 from God, and everybody, even the Pope, is obliged to submit 
 to it in that which appertains to the Faith, the eradication of 
 schism, and the reformation of 'head and limbs' (of the 
 Church, scil.). 2. Whosoever, were it even the Pope, per- 
 sistently refuses obedience to the orders, statutes, and decrees 
 of this Holy Synod, and every other legally assembled 
 General Council, with regard to the above points and others 
 related to it, is to undergo penance and to be punished 
 accordingly, even if other (non-ecclesiastical) means should 
 have to be resorted to." 
 
 That is explicit— is it not ? More so than either Lyons 
 or Florence, which are so grandly quoted by the Vatican 
 advocates on the relation between Council and Pope, and 
 which have no more to do with that question than with the 
 man in the moon. But those Constance prelates were more 
 explicit still. They first forced the Pope of the period, 
 John XXIII., formally to abdicate, " on account of the great 
 scandal caused by his great and heavy sins." He suggested 
 two formulas of abdication, fraught with insults to the two 
 anti-Popes of the period, Benedict XIII. and Gregory XII. 
 But these formulas were rejected by the Council, and, 
 finally, he not merely subscribed to another, but " swore 
 and vowed solemnly and publicly to God and the Church, 
 and this Holy Council, to restore peace unto the Church 
 by laying down the Papal dignity." This he swore on the 
 
 s 2
 
 260 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 2nd of March. On the 20tli of the same month Frederick 
 of Austria gave a tournament, by way of entertainment to 
 the endless number of people who had flocked to Constance. 
 The clergy alone, with their servants, amounted to 18,000 
 persons. There were 1700 " Posaunner, PfeifYer, Flother," 
 and there were, says honest Dacher, who had to make out 
 the lists, " mulieres communes, quas reperi in domibus, et 
 ultra et non minus, exceptis aliis, dcc," a number confirmed 
 by other list-makers. " Often fahrend Dirnen ob 700, heim- 
 lich Dirnen und Curtisanen vast viel," say Eeichenthal and 
 Justinger. And while they were all rejoicing at the tour- 
 nament, ex-Pope John cancelled his resignation by abscond- 
 ing, in the disguise of an ostler, to Schaffhausen, whence 
 he informed the Council that he was very happy where 
 he was, " free and in fresh air." And the confusion and 
 the strife in Church and Council now became irreparable. 
 No less than seventy-two charges were drawn up by the 
 Council containing the crimes of which John had been 
 "notoriously" guilty, and of which murder, unchastity, 
 simony, and theft formed principal items. Eighteen of 
 these were subsequently struck out, " though they were 
 crimes well attested by witnesses — in order to save the 
 dignity of the Church." John had, in the interval, been made 
 prisoner by the Burggraf of Nuremberg, and at Eadolfszell 
 these fifty-four dread charges were communicated to him 
 by legates of the Council. His reply was "that he most 
 deeply repented having furtively left Constance. Death 
 would have been better for him than this flight. He would 
 not defend himself. He submitted entirely to the decrees 
 of the Synod, as he had already previously declared. The 
 Council was sacred and infallible and never would he think 
 of contradicting! it" And on the twelfth general sitting of 
 the Council, held in the Cathedral of Constance, in the 
 presence of the Emperor, mass was sung by the Patriarch 
 of Antioch, and was followed by the Litany, with the verse, 
 " Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the Prince 
 of this world be cast out " (John xii. 31) ; at the end of 
 which Pope John XXIII. was formally deposed in terms
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 261 
 
 of most scornful contempt. All the charges against him 
 were solemnly and briefly reiterated. He was condemned 
 to be kept prisoner and to await further punishment. And 
 with him were solemnly deposed Angelo Corrario and Peter 
 da Lima — whilom Benedict XIII. and Gregory XII. — the 
 two other infallible contemporary Popes ; the one in Spain, 
 the other in France. John's Papal Seal, or Bulla, having 
 been publicly broken to pieces, and his Papal arms having 
 been publicly and solemnly torn to pieces, the meeting ad- 
 journed, or rather service was at an end. When John was 
 informed of it all he merely observed that they were per- 
 fectly right, and that he wished he had never been Pope. 
 How he died, having bought his liberty for 30,000 florins, 
 and having again been made Cardinal-Bishop of Tusculum 
 by his successor, Martin V., is related in a very edifying 
 manner in Church history. Indeed, he had but a narrow 
 escape from being canonized. He lies buried in the famous 
 Baptistery near the Cathedral of Florence. 
 
 One characteristic episode at the end of this wonderful 
 Council must not be forgotten. The Emperor Sigismund, 
 who played a very prominent part at it, had lived high at 
 Constance, both he and his suite. But, as usual, he had no 
 money. Whereupon the townspeople, his creditors, as he 
 was about to leave, seized upon his dinner service. He 
 however, equal to the occasion, addressed them in a very 
 touching speech, exhorting them not to keep his plate, 
 but rather certain beautifully worked coverlets and cushions, 
 which he would take out of pawn without delay. They were 
 much moved by this speech and kept the coverlets. But 
 they had overlooked the little fact that these had the Im- 
 perial arms woven into them and could not in any way be 
 sold, "which impoverished many of them of Constance to 
 a piteous degree," says the chronicler. 
 
 The Vatican prelates do not refer to the Council of Con- 
 stance, which is to the purpose. Nor do they refer to that 
 of Basle, held under the very next Pope, Eugenius IV. For, 
 finding the prelates assembled too much imbued with the 
 spirit of Constance, which is equally pertinent, this Pope
 
 262 FIVE LETTERS ON 
 
 closed the Council for a year and a half, to be reopened 
 at Bologna. But the Council peremptorily refused to be 
 closed. At Basle it was and at Basle it would remain, the 
 Pope was told, until it had done its business, which consisted 
 chiefly in " the amelioration of morals in the Church and 
 the restoration of peace," and by way of a further hint it 
 confirmed solemnly the decree of Constance whereby every 
 person, especially the Pope, has to submit to the authority 
 of the Council. They also begged his Holiness to favour 
 the assembly with his sublime presence or his representa- 
 tives, " else they would feel compelled to judge him according 
 to the laws of the Church." The Pope, without delay, 
 graciously acceded to their humble wishes ; which, however, 
 did not prevent the Council, when he subsequently played 
 them false, from excommunicating his Holiness. 
 
 We repeat it : neither Lyons nor Florence, so glibly quoted 
 by these saintly savans in support of their pet doctrine of the 
 absolute power of the Popes over the Councils, ever touched 
 that question. The supremacy of Pome, in the matter of 
 rank, was discussed there, and in relation, not to prelates in 
 or out of Council, but to the Greek Church. And we know 
 how long the union arrived at on these two occasions lasted 
 — that one night's gourd. If the Council of Lyons had 
 established this same union in 1274, it was exactly in 1282 
 — eight years afterwards — that the Greek churches were 
 " plentifully sprinkled with holy water to purify them from 
 the taint of that union." And all its previous advocates 
 and wellwishers, both clerics and laymen, were laid under 
 penances, and the Greek Emperor, who had lent his coun- 
 tenance to it, was not even allowed a decent burial by his 
 own son. Thus much for Lyons and its achievements. Next 
 comes Ferrara-Florence, when the Greek Emperor, even at 
 the temporary price of the Filioque, wished the West to 
 relieve him from the Grand Turk, and when the Pope on 
 one side and the Council on the other tried to outbid each 
 other at Constantinople, even as two rival Cheap Jacks. One 
 of the principal sources for this Council is, indeed, formed 
 on a contemporary work called A Truthful History of an
 
 THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 263 
 
 Unjust Council, by Syropulos, himself a member of that 
 Council. Very amusing are the preliminaries to it — how 
 the Basle prelates and the Pope sent rival galleys for the 
 Greeks, and how the two nearly came to blows in the Bos- 
 phorus; how these Greeks were much puzzled as to which 
 was the proper firm — Basle or Rome ; and how the Sultan 
 advised the Emperor Manuel (Palaeologus) rather to form an 
 alliance with himself, against whom he sought the assistance 
 of these Latin rivals ; what wranglings there were when the 
 assembly had been opened at last even on that vital question 
 where the rival chairs should stand ; how the Pope contrived 
 to have a bigger and a more costly throne than either the 
 Patriarch or the Emperor — which made them both say bitter 
 things about the worldly vanity of Borne ; how, further, the 
 rations of these Greeks were stopped the instant they 
 proved unmanageable, and were increased whenever they 
 behaved properly : — all this is very instructive reading, and 
 it makes one's heart ache in these days to read that the Pope 
 allowed His Majesty during his attendance at the Council 
 no less than thirty florins a month, while the Patriarch 
 received twenty-five, the " Despot " twenty, the " officers " 
 four, and the servants three florins a-piece. No less 
 instructive are the discussions of this Ferrara -Florence 
 Council themselves. The third point on the list — Purgatory 
 — being chosen first, great and hot disputes arose, in which 
 Judas Maccabaeus, and St. Paul, and Lazarus, and Basil the 
 Great, and Gregory of Nyssa and John Damascene, and 
 Peter, and Abraham's bosom were freely handled by both 
 parties ; and when, in the course of the debate, the question 
 was put by a Latin prelate, What was the nature of hell fire ? 
 his Greek opponent glibly answered that the eminent Father 
 who had put the question would, he was sure, in good time 
 find out the answer by personal experience. No more could 
 they agree about the state of the souls of the saints, or any 
 other similar topic, as long as they were at Ferrara. But 
 when they had received two florins extra pay (and their 
 four months' arrear besides) for their journey from Ferrara 
 to Florence, whither the Council was removed in 1439,
 
 2G4 FIVE LETTERS ON THE (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 
 
 things went on more smoothly — until that second union 
 came to pass, which was, if possible, of even less duration 
 than the first. The first cry of the Greek Bishops when 
 they touched their native shore was, "We have sold our 
 faith ; we have exchanged orthodoxy for heterodoxy. May 
 our hands which signed the unjust decree be cut off! May 
 our tongues which have agreed with the Latins be plucked 
 out!" And the people shunned them, and their clerical 
 brethren would not even officiate with them. Nor was the 
 union itself proclaimed in Constantinople, and before many 
 years had passed it was a thing of naught. A Church 
 Council assembled in Santa Sophia in 1450, which solemnly 
 and unconditionally revoked, rejected, and annulled for ever 
 the decree of the Council of Florence " as contrary to the 
 Faith." 
 
 Such is a sample of the arguments now in preparation 
 at the Vatican. As regards especially this Greek question 
 and its present aspect, our readers may remember what we 
 told them in our first paper about the reception of the Papal 
 Legates by the Patriarchs. They may find further details 
 as to the contemporary Greek opinions in a learned and 
 lucid paper in the current Edinburgh Review. 
 
 Two more regal utterances have come to hand since we 
 last wrote. Both Prim and Victor Emmanuel have officially 
 declared that they will not allow the Council's eventual 
 decrees to interfere in any way with the laws of their lands. 
 And there are dark rumours afloat regarding the occupation 
 question. What if Napoleon III., in order to give the 
 Vatican absolute freedom of deliberation, should withdraw 
 his troops just for the time being? There is something fas- 
 cinating in the picture of what would happen. If Napoleon 
 had any humour left in him, here is, indeed, an occasion. 
 However, come what may, there is one piece of comfort left. 
 Isabella, late of Spain, has promised to be present at the 
 OEcumenical Council. Who can say that there is no balm 
 in Gilead ?
 
 ( 265 ) 
 
 XII. 
 APOSTOLIOE SEDIS. 1 
 
 vi Apostolicie Sedis Moderationi — ■" it has befitted the modera- 
 tion of the Apostolic See to issue, in accordance " with the 
 change of times and things," a new edition of Excommuni- 
 cations, Suspensions, and Interdicts. — Thus, briefly, the 
 preamble to the notorious " Constitution " promulgated by 
 Pius IX. at the beginning of the present Council. 
 
 We do not intend to consider the merits of that document 
 either from the philosopher's or the antiquary's point of 
 view. Neither shall we enter upon its single clauses, armed 
 with the Bible and the Fathers, theologically. We onty 
 offer a few stray data towards the better understanding of 
 some of its details. If there be a moral in them, it shall be 
 the readers', not ours, to point it. 
 
 Our document contains six principal divisions. Four are 
 devoted to Excommunications exclusively. Of them we 
 have a sum total of thirty-six. Twelve of these, again, are 
 " especially reserved " to the Pope, while seventeen are 
 merely " reserved " to him. Three are left to the bishops, 
 or " ordinaries," and the final four are " reserved to nobody." 
 The fifth general division contains seven cases of Suspension 
 reserved to the Pope, and the whole decree winds up with 
 two " reserved " Interdicts. Thus the sum total amounts to 
 forty-five. All these cases are Juatee Sentential, which means 
 that such Excommunication, Suspension, or Interdict follows 
 
 1 This article appeared in ' Macmillan's Magazine,' February, 1S70. 
 Re-printed by permission.
 
 260 APOSTOLIC/E SEDIS. 
 
 the respective transgression without any further process — 
 sentence being, as it were, already pronounced : while in 
 what is styled Ferenda? Sentential a special investigation and 
 verdict are requisite. The term, like many others used in 
 the Church, belongs to classical Rome. In that ancient 
 Commonwealth it meant to give one's vote or judgment, 
 or rather, to carry (ferre) that vote, in the shape of a 
 little waxed tablet, inscribed with certain initials (JUbsolvo, 
 O-ondemno, &c), to the Cista (not sitella) or urn. Voting 
 in Council, which was done viva voce, was, therefore, mostly 
 called sententiam dicere, to speak one's opinion. 
 
 The first and principal division consists of the old Bidla 
 Coenai, with certain alterations to be mentioned further on. 
 This " Lord's Supper Bull " derives its name from the fact 
 that certain anathemas which it embodies were promulgated 
 by the Popes — down to exactly one hundred years ago — 
 first three times a year ; finally, only once. The day 
 specially fixed upon was Maundy-Thursday, as the day of 
 grace when Christ after supper had prayed for the unity 
 and concord of the Church. It was on that day, also, that 
 Paschal II., in 1102, excommunicated Henry IV. of Germany 
 as liaireticorum caput, and Gregory IX. did the same to the 
 Emperor Frederick II. in 1227 : somewhat to their own 
 later discomfiture. And on that day, year by year, it was 
 the Pope's privilege, immediately after he had pronounced 
 the apostolic benediction over the countless multitudes, to 
 utter as many curses as the Bull, which always moved with 
 the times, contained during his pontificate. It was the office 
 of the cardinals, archbishops, and bishops who surrounded 
 him, dressed in their pontificals, to throw, when the last 
 word had been said, the burning tapers to the ground and to 
 tread them under foot. The bells, meanwhile, were set in 
 motion, but in a peculiar fashion, so as to make their tolling 
 a thing of great horror. They were rung " inordinately," 
 and " in detestation em" viz. of those who had been cursed. 
 Finally, the decree was nailed to the doors of the Basilica 
 of St. Peter and the Church of the Lateran. Those who fell
 
 APOSTOLIC^ SEDIS. 267 
 
 under its provisions were forbidden to participate in all or 
 any sacrament and to enter a church. No one was allowed 
 " to pray with them or to speak to them, to eat with them 
 or to drink with them, to hold communion with them in 
 council, to kiss them or to greet them. They are not to be 
 buried, and no bell is to be tolled where they have lived." 
 Aud all this was carried out in very bitter earnest. 
 
 The Bulla Coense, in its latest shape, which is due to 
 Urban VIII., embodies twenty of those cases in which the 
 Pope alone, to the exclusion of every mortal, can absolve, 
 and which, in this sense, are " reserved " to him. This, so 
 far from being at first considered a hardship, was pressed 
 upon the Papal see by the Clergy itself. The very first 
 authenticated " reserved case " established at the Council of 
 Clermont in 1130, was, as it were, " an Act for the better 
 protection of ecclesiastical persons," aud probably owes its 
 origin to England. The English law of the period did not, 
 it seems, take sufficient care of the ecclesiastics in the realm, 
 and loud and incessant were their cries against the violence 
 they had to endure " at the hands of robbers and evil-doers, 
 who do not sufficiently respect the Church of God and His 
 anointed." And when Innocent II., after the death of 
 Honorius II., had been furtively elected Pope by a mino- 
 rity of sixteen or seventeen cardinals — an Antipope, Pier 
 Leone, the favourite of Rome, being proclaimed as Anaclete 
 II. by a majority of thirty cardinals the very next day — 
 and had been confirmed by St. Bernard amid general ac- 
 clamation, one of his first acts at that Council of Clermont 
 was the canon called Pereussio clerici. The anathema, to be 
 recalled only by himself, was pronounced upon any one who 
 should lay violent hands upon any clerical person or monk. 
 The offence, however, cannot have been of very long stand- 
 ing. The preamble states that " new medicaments must be 
 applied to new vices." The anathema was renewed in the 
 following year at the Council of Rheims, in 1134 at that of 
 Pisa, and in 1139 at that of the Lateran ; while at a synod 
 held in London in 1138 (at which clerics were also forbidden
 
 26S APOSTOLIC/E SEDIS. 
 
 to carry on the trade of usurers), and at another held either 
 at Westminster or at Winchester in 1143, this edict was, as 
 " necessary for the time," especially and solemnly promul- 
 gated for domestic use. At the latter synod the Fathers of 
 their own accord added another crime as " reserved " for the 
 Pope, viz. that of breaking into churches. 
 
 The principal force of this " Reservation " lay in the fact 
 that the culprit was compelled to make a journey to Rome, 
 the abode of him who alone could "loose" him. Thus 
 Innocent III. writes to the Bishop of Montreale, — " For 
 greater security and higher reverence has the Apostolic Sec 
 reserved to itself alone the right of absolution, in order that 
 those whom neither the fear of God nor the clerical holiness 
 {religio) keep in check should be restrained at least by the 
 labour and difficulty of the road," — an argument which may 
 have lost some of its force since the twelfth century. 
 
 Ere we proceed, however, it behoves us to say a word 
 about the whole theory of the "Reservation." Theoretically, 
 eveiy ordained priest has the power of absolving. It is 
 given to him, during the imposition of hands, by the Holy 
 Ghost. But with this poiestas ordinis, it is held by some, is 
 not also combined the potestas jurisdictionis, or power of 
 jurisdiction, both of which are requisite for absolving. This 
 second and more important power is inherent in the Church, 
 or rather the Episcopate, and must be given specially. 
 Bishops, therefore, may impart it to their subordinate 
 priests or withhold it from them, as they see fit. The 
 Council of Trent confirmed ancient rules embodying this 
 view, by declaring the absolution pronounced by a priest 
 over any one not subject to his ordinary or delegated juris- 
 diction, null and void. The Pope, as summit and crown of 
 the Church, and as " holder of the keys," stands also above 
 the Episcopate, and may therefore reserve to himself all and 
 every sin, to the exclusion even of the bishops. He is the 
 Judex ordinarius, the Pastor pastorum, called in plenitudinem 
 potestatis, and his excommunication may be removed by none 
 but himself, or his special locum tenens or delegate. Such is
 
 APOSTOLIOE SEDIS. 269- 
 
 one ecclesiastical theory. But there is another, backed by 
 other ecclesiastical authorities. It is this : that the Pope 
 usurps that right, of which he also has not made use during 
 the first Christian centuries, which alone are " normal," and 
 the privileges of which are " ancient and divine ;" whilst 
 those of a later date, like the Reservation, are due in a great 
 measure to the Isidorian Decretals, which are condemned as 
 forgeries by the Church itself. Such rights are but " acci- 
 dental and human," and therefore of no account. As lone: 
 as the Pope does not abuse them, they may be left to him ; 
 if he does, thev must be taken from him. even against his 
 will. The orthodox reply to this is, that Gregory the Great 
 and Alexander II. had cle facto had special cases brought 
 before them, and that these constitute an apt and proper 
 precedent for the early centuries. It is not generally em- 
 phasized, we think, that in both cases it was simply the 
 Papal judgment invoked and given against a bishop and an 
 archbishop respectively. Be this, however, as it may, prac- 
 tically the bishops often and early enough resorted of their 
 own free accord to the punishment of a peregrination to 
 Borne as an apt way of getting a troublesome sinner out of 
 the country for some time — with the chance of his never 
 returning again. On the other hand, the good people of 
 Borne did not object to the often noble penitents, who spent 
 their money whilst they performed their penance. Thus 
 went Bomewards King Bobert of France, and with him went 
 the bishops who had sanctioned his incestuous marriage ; 
 thus Guarnerius, the criminal Bishop of Strasburg, "fasting 
 with much fatigue" Bemedius of Lincoln sent a priest 
 guilty of murder to Gregory VII. ; Henry IV. of Germany 
 stood at Canossa ; and King Philip of France was absolved 
 from adultery by Urban II., at Borne. Also did Archbishop 
 Laurentius of Dublin, among others, consign no less than 
 one hundred and fifty " licentious Irish priests " to the Holy 
 Father in 1197, and the Bishop of Groswardein himself was 
 ordered to go to Borne, to get absolution — if he could — for a 
 certain sin of which he had been notoriously and repeatedly 
 guilty.
 
 270 APOSTOLKLE SEDIS. 
 
 The first reserved case having been established, it was 
 found expedient to make exceptions, partly in favour of the 
 clergy, but partly also in favour of those laymen who should 
 "punish" clerics "caught in flagranti with their wives, 
 mothers, daughters, or sisters," or who should defend them- 
 selves against " unjust violence " on the part of a cleric. 
 Occasionally also the Pope waived his right, or rather trans- 
 ferred it to cardinal legates or special bishops. Thus the 
 Bishop of Genoa was permitted by Alexander III. to absolve 
 a certain canon who had beaten a sub-dean. Another step 
 in the other direction, however, was to make this ban valid 
 without special excommunication, which at first had been 
 indispensable. It was now considered pronounced ipso facto, 
 or latse sententim ; terms which are indeed not used in the 
 matter during the first stages. 
 
 Out of this single case there grew, in the course of a few 
 centuries, about one hundred and twenty, from which the 
 Bulla Coente of Urban VIII. has selected, as mentioned 
 above, exactly twenty. But it took some time — about two 
 centuries — before to the first was added the second, and to 
 the second the third case. At the commencement of the 
 fourteenth century we find no more than three authenticated 
 reserved cases. In 1364, however, Urban V. was already 
 able to issue a regular Bull with seven cases from Avignon, 
 among which there appears for the first time the occupation 
 of the Papal dominion and the hindering of Papal mes- 
 sengers, as well as the selling of ammunition to the enemies 
 of the Church. The latter proviso was enacted with a 
 special view to that Pope's pet crusade, inaugurated by the 
 King of Cyprus and Peter Thomas, which came to so speedy 
 and ignominious an end. A new and revised edition of the 
 Ccena was put forth by Gregory XI. in 1370, and another 
 by Gregory XII. in 1411, which begins in this wise : — " We 
 excommunicate and anathematize, in the name of God the 
 Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and by the au- 
 thority of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul and our own, 
 all heretics, ' Gazaros, Patarenos, Pauperes de Lugduno, 

 
 APOSTOLIOE SEDIS. 271 
 
 Arnaldistas, Speronistas et Passaginos,' and all other heretics 
 of whatsoever name, and all them that favour, receive, and 
 defend them. Likewise do we excommunicato and anathe- 
 matize," &c. &c. &c. 
 
 In 1512, Julius II. re-issued the Bull, with twelve cases, 
 among which figures already the curse upon falsifiers of 
 Papal Bulls and other sacred emanations. In 1536, Paul 
 III. had brought his version up to seventeen, including the 
 curse upon them that would make clerical persons submit to 
 the civil authorities, and those who abstract relics from 
 Eoman churches. Not quite fifty years later, in 1583, under 
 Gregory XIII., the Bull had swollen to twenty-one cases, 
 among which there is the reading of Luther and all or any 
 heretic, and the printiug or defending of such heretics' 
 writings. In its final shape, that due to Urban VIII., it has 
 lain dormant since Clement XIV., who would no longer read 
 it on Maundy-Thursday — "it no longer being a time for 
 cursing but for grace," he said. But only dormant. It has 
 quietly kept its place, in spite of many prohibitions, in 
 several modern rituals. It is now first abrogated formally 
 by this new " Constitution." 
 
 We have been at the pains of comparing the two docu- 
 ments somewhat closely, in order to see wherein the " mode- 
 ration " of the Apostolic See aforementioned has manifested 
 itself. First of all it must be noted that our document is 
 considerably larger, embodying as it does a number of such 
 reserved cases as were left out in the ancient Bulla Ccense. 
 Next, that the time-honoured introduction to the special 
 paragraphs of the old Bull, " Excommunicamus ei anathema- 
 tizamus" has given way to special, business-like headings. 
 Indeed, the difference between those two papal terms of 
 displeasure seems to have become somewhat shadowy in 
 these latter days. This was not so at one time. Indeed, as 
 early as the ninth century the faithful knew tbat while " ex- 
 communication " merely meant exclusion from the Church 
 and all its benefits, together with public penitence and 
 banishment from home and society, — not to forget the
 
 272 APOSTOLICLE SEDIS. 
 
 instant dismissal from all and every civil and military office 
 or dignity: the state of those that lay under the "anathema'* 
 was far worse. They were cut off utterly and irrevocably as 
 " putrid and desperate members " from the entire body of 
 the Church. Unto them there is "nulla legum, nulla morum, 
 nulla collec/ii particvpatio" whether they be alive or dead. 
 Their names " shall not be remembered even among the 
 defunct," nor shall " even in their dying hour any communi- 
 cation be held with them." In many other respects the text 
 of this new " Constitution " of Pius IX. follows that of the 
 Bull, as for as it goes, pretty closely, sometimes literally. 
 Except, perhaps, that paragraph 1 of the latter figures now 
 as paragraphs 1 to 3, or that the " Latinity " has undergone 
 certain alterations. If, e.g., the old edict has " ac omnes et," 
 the new reads " et omnes ac ;" for " ac iis," we have " eis- 
 que," for " et generaliter " we get " ac generaliter," and 
 similar improvements, " in accordance with the change of 
 times." 
 
 Yet more significant emendations, both of omission and 
 commission, are not wanting. We have already said that 
 clause 1 of the Coena is broken up here into three, which 
 deal respectively with " apostates and heretics," with 
 " readers, keepers, printers, and defenders of heretical 
 books," and " schismatics and others disobedient to the 
 Pope." While in the first new paragraph we miss the 
 familiar names of " Hussites, Wycliffites, Lutherans, Zwing- 
 lians, Calvinists, Huguenots, Anabaptists, Trinitarians," and 
 so forth, we rejoice to find the second clause altered in 
 favour of those persons whose business it is to read all the 
 bad books which are to be placed on the Index. Hitherto, 
 the anathema included all and every one who read such 
 heretical writings, " from whatsoever cause ; publicly or 
 secretly ; in whatsoever spirit ; and under whatsoever 
 colour." This provision is no more. Cursed are now only 
 those who " knowingly read, keep, print, use, without the 
 authority of the Holy See, the books of those apostates and 
 heretics which propagate heresy, as well as those, by whom-
 
 APOSTOLICLE SEDIS. 273 
 
 soever written, which are specially prohibited by apostolic 
 letters." So that the Fathers of the " Congregation of the 
 Index " — here brought to public recognition — are theoretical 
 outcasts no more. Clause 2 of the Ccena becomes clause 4 
 in our document. It excommunicates all and every one 
 who should presume to appeal from the Pope to a future 
 Council. The origin of this decree has again to be looked 
 for in England, where the clergy, in the thirteenth century, 
 so far from paying Innocent IV. what he demanded, dared 
 to appeal to a future general Council instead. The same 
 was done by the two cardinals de Colonna, Jacobus and 
 Petrus, whom Boniface VIII. had deposed and excommuni- 
 cated. Philip IV. of France appealed against the same 
 Pope, after having publicly burnt the Bull, " Listen, my 
 son," directed against himself. Lewis the Bavarian appealed 
 in 1324 against John XXII., and finally there appealed the 
 whole College of Cardinals — except four, whom Gregory 
 XII. had created, in spite of his solemn oath to the contrary 
 — against that Holy Father. It was Martin V. who first 
 sought to suppress this demurring to Papal authority by 
 excommunication ; which, however, did not prevent the Uni- 
 versity of Paris and the clergy of the diocese of Rouen from 
 appealing against Calixtus III. Whereupon Pius II. issued 
 the Bull " Execrabilis," which, very stringent and very 
 pathetic as it was, was so utterly disregarded by Sigismund, 
 Duke of Austria, that, not later than a month after its pro- 
 mulgation, he appealed to a future Council. Not very long- 
 afterwards, the Archbishop of Mayence, being excommuni- 
 cated, followed his example in also appealing against his 
 excommunication to a future Council. Likewise did the 
 Venetians appeal to a Council against Julius II., and though 
 Gregory XIII. at last placed this sin formally upon the Coena, 
 Louis XIV. again appealed against Innocent XI. Even so, 
 a few months ago, Pere Hyacinthe threatened to appeal, 
 eventually, to a future General Council. We at first missed 
 one passage of this clause in our new Bull, that treating 
 of " L T niversities, Colleges, and Chapters/' until we dis- 
 covered it later on, leading off the division of " Interdicts." 
 
 T
 
 274 ArOSTOLICiE SEDIS. 
 
 Entirely gone are clauses 3 to 5 of the old Bull. They 
 treat, respectively, of pirates and corsairs " in our sea, from 
 Argentorato to Terracina, and all their abettors," further of 
 wreckers — wrecking being a privilege granted occasionally 
 to bishops and monasteries — and of leviers of such tolls as 
 had not been sanctified by the Pope. Clause 6 of the old 
 Bull reappears as number 9 of the new. It is devoted to 
 falsifiers of Papal briefs and writs, and there is one alteration 
 noticeable. For the old " fdlso fabrieantur " we have the 
 mild "/also publicantur" so that it is the propagator more 
 than the author who must now beware. Time certainly was, 
 when forg-in^ absolutions for all manner of sin was the source 
 of sundry good incomes, both lay and clerical, but it is to be 
 feared that this trade has become somewhat slack. Nor are 
 they who sell horses, arms, and other war-materials to the 
 Turks, Sarassins, and other heretics, any longer under the 
 ban, or those " even if they be emperors, or kings, or clerical 
 dignitaries," who impede the carrying of victuals to Rorue, 
 or who slay or imprison them that go to Rome to complain 
 of their bishops — a practice once in vogue, but to which the 
 bishops themselves often put a stop by the unghostly means 
 here condemned. Again, clause 11 that was, has become 
 clause 5 that is, and it is preserved scrupulously intact. It 
 treats of all and any harm done to patriarchs, archbishops, 
 bishops, and legates. They are not to be "killed, mutilated, 
 wounded, beaten, captured, imprisoned, stopped, persecuted, 
 or turned out of their dioceses, lands, territories, or domi- 
 nions." Once upon a time, the Emperor Frederic II. took 
 prisoner no less than a hundred ecclesiastics, on their way to 
 Rome — among them three Papal legates, the Archbishops of 
 Rouen, Auch, Bordeaux, and many bishops and abbots, 
 some of whom died in his strongholds in Apulia. In the 
 same spirit of irreverence the King of England caused the 
 Papal legates to be " well beaten " and turned out of 
 the country in 1232. Even Pope Urban IV. when, as 
 Innocent IV.'s legate, he went to Germany, was put into 
 prison. It was in 1311, at the Council of Vienne, that
 
 APOSTOLICxE SEDIS. 275 
 
 Clement V. had this case therefore formally entered as 
 " reserved." When Cardinal Borromeo was shot in his own 
 chapel, Pius V. extended, in 1569, the curse to all those 
 who, having any knowledge of the perpetrator of an offence 
 against those Church dignitaries, should fail to betray hiin. 
 Not long after this, Henry III. of France put the Cardinal 
 of Lorraine to death, and G-regory XIII. not only embodied 
 the case in the Coena, but extended the protective ana- 
 thema to even the legates and messengers of the Apostolic 
 See. 
 
 Three more of the new paragraphs correspond, framed a 
 little more concisely, to those of the old document. They 
 refer to the supremacy of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Cursed 
 is now, as was then, all and every person who recurs to the 
 civil courts in anything relating to the Church, or to persons 
 belonging to the Church : cursed is likewise every one who 
 makes laws contrary to the liberty of the Church, or who 
 impedes the progress of any ecclesiastical emanation in any 
 way whatsoever. This excommunication applies, in one 
 shape or another, to well nigh every single king, and em- 
 peror, and prince, and president, and parliament and court 
 of justice, and judge (except the Pope and his own advisers) 
 who at this moment exercise any authority whatsoever. The 
 origin of this " appeal from the abuse of the Apostolic Chair 
 (as it was called) to the secular courts," emanated from the 
 clergy itself, and finds its first expression in the reformatory 
 decrees of the Councils of Basle and Constance. This power 
 of appeal against, e.g., the bestowal of rich benefices upon 
 what were considered the wrong persons, was first granted to 
 the French clergy by Charles Y1I. in 1438, but rescinded 
 by the Concordat of 1515. The Parliament, however, in 
 utter disregard of it, continued to hear cases lodged by the 
 clergy against the bishops, and by the bishops against the 
 Popes. Then it came to pass that Gregory XIII. cursed all 
 these appeals in the Coena, as well as the so-called placitum 
 regium. By virtue of this Placet every Papal Bull or other 
 emanation had to be examined by the civil powers before its 
 
 T 2
 
 276 ArOSTOLICLE SEDIS. 
 
 promulgation was allowed. In France it was even necessary 
 that both Parliaments, that of Toulouse and of Paris, should 
 give their permit each time, one being considered insuf- 
 ficient. In Spain the prelates themselves claimed the right 
 to look into those publications before they endorsed thorn, 
 and eventually refused to take any notice of them. The 
 pretext to this proceeding was given by the prodigious 
 numbers of forged Papal letters in circulation. Only such 
 as they saw reason to approve, they said, did they consider 
 genuine : since the Pope would not issue what displeased 
 them. Leo X. protested, but in vain. Even so did Innocent 
 VIII. ; and finally Julius II. made all let or hindrance 
 against the publication of any of his emanations, whatever 
 their nature, a case in the Coena. 
 
 Regarding the other portion of this enactment, that of 
 bringing clerical matters before lay tribunals, nothing can 
 be more instructive than the history of the struggle between 
 the Church and the State, or the clerical and lay courts, as 
 to the limits of their authority. The former not merely 
 excommunicated all those who brought their complaints in 
 Church matters before laymen, but actually threatened 
 whole countries where a like thing was to happen, with the 
 interdict and the refusal of burial. On the other hand, the 
 civil authorities punished all those who took their cases to 
 the Church authorities. They fined them and imprisoned 
 them ; them, their friends, notaries, and counsels, until they 
 desisted. Worse still, if any one had, with a large outlay, 
 at last obtained a censure from Rome against his adversary, 
 he was himself compelled to procure absolution for such 
 censure. Stronger even was the resistance against arraign- 
 ing ecclesiastics bodily before a lay forum ; and the Synod 
 of Nismes, in 1096, declared this to be nothing less than 
 " terrible sacrilege ;" and to clinch the matter, all judicial 
 acts against clerics were pronounced null and void. The 
 Third Lateran Council excommunicated the very attempt of 
 bringing a cleric to ordinary justice, and incessant were the 
 reiterations and protests enacted by subsequent Councils. 

 
 APOSTOLIC-*: SED1S. 277 
 
 But little attention was paid to them until, in 1536, Paul 
 III. embodied the matter in the Coena. In 1855, Pius IX. 
 had to yield the point in the late Austrian Concordat, but 
 he did so under protest, and with the special clause tern- 
 porum rations hdbita. The Concordat has gone the way of 
 many another Concordat, and the old enactment has now 
 renewed its days. 
 
 The tenth clause of the new Bull is not found in the old 
 Bull, though it is not new in itself. It is one of the six- 
 score " outside cases " of which we spoke before. It pro- 
 hibits clerics who have sinned against the seventh command- 
 ment from confessing and absolving the women with whom 
 they have sinned. The frail ones must go to another and 
 more impartial confessor; or rather, as the Council of 
 Bheims enacted, the priest in question is to be absolved first, 
 after which he shall absolve those women. However, the 
 prohibition, entered and re-entered upon the Acts of Council 
 after Council, does not seem to have been very rigorously 
 kept. At last, however, the matter had become so flagrant, 
 that Benedict XIV., in the " Sacramentum Poenitentise" 
 forbade a priest ever to absolve at the confessional a woman 
 with whom he had notoriously broken his vows — even during 
 a Jubilee. His absolution is, except in case of death " and 
 if no other priest be nigh," that is, if another priest could 
 not be called in " without great risk of infamy and scandal," 
 declared null and void ; and, adds Benedict in that decree, 
 the guilty confessor should not persuade himself of the exist- 
 ence of a like risk of infamy and scandal, if there really be 
 none such. Further, though the absolution given by a like 
 confessor be valid, he himself remains under the excom- 
 munication for all that. 
 
 Our eleventh paragraph corresponds to the seventeenth 
 of the Coena. It prohibits usurpation and sequestration of 
 Church property. For the old quive . . . usurpant vel . . . 
 sequestrant we have the new latmity, iisurpantes aut seques- 
 trantes ; for fructus we have bona; for the plural jv/risdio- 
 tiones we have the singular ; the word proventus has been
 
 278 APOSTOLIC^ SEDIS. 
 
 struck out, aud also the whole sentence, "Which belong 
 uuto Us and the Apostolic See," as well as the word 
 " monasteries." The tailpiece whereby such seizing of 
 goods or lands was permitted, if done by order of the Pope, 
 is also no more. It is true enough that the Church has 
 often had to suffer from these "usurpations." She was so 
 rich that the worldly powers, in spite of the thunders of the 
 first, second, and third Lateran Councils, would stretch out 
 their hands after the res dominicse, Deo sacratse, ra rod deov, 
 &c, as these possessions were variously styled. And not 
 merely, as the third Lateran Council complained, " when 
 these men want to build castles or to go to war," did they 
 contract forced loans with the Church, but as early as the 
 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries many princes fell into a 
 way of secularising right and left what they deemed an 
 encumbrance upon the Holy Church, which, they said, " was 
 to look to the riches of heaven." Nay, not satisfied with 
 annexing churches and chapels, they even took possession 
 sometimes of the castles, villas, parks, and fishing and 
 hunting grounds, of archbishops and bishops. The conse- 
 quence was so wild an uproar, that the Synod of Lavaux 
 pronounced the Anathema upon such robbers, and placed 
 their entire domains under the Interdict. If such comes, 
 senescallus, baro, judex, or capitantus died, his body was not 
 to be buried — even if he had died in a state of absolution — • 
 until his heir had made restitution to the full. Further 
 Councils deprived even those who only advised burial of 
 such transgressors of the benefit of interment. Yet matters 
 do not seem to have been altered much by these threats. 
 "When Louis XL of France wished a General Council to be 
 summoned, Sixtus IV. bitterly answered, " It would be better 
 for the honour of some princes if a like Council did not take 
 place, since it might otherwise reveal their usurpation of 
 Church property." In 1512, Julius II. entered this sin duly 
 in the old Bull. Paul III. extended its provisions still 
 further, and Gregory III. made new additions with special 
 regard to the Holy See and all that belonged to it.
 
 AP0ST0L1OE SEDIS. 279 
 
 The last paragraph of the " specially reserved " cases of 
 the new document forms also the last paragraph of the Bulla 
 Coenee. But a considerable shortening has taken place : — 
 
 " Likewise dc we excommunicate and anathematize all those " — so reads 
 the old — " who by themselves or by others, directly or indirectly, under 
 whatsoever title or colour, do presume to invade, destroy, occupy, and 
 detain, entirely or in part, the Holy City, the kingdom of Sicily, the islands 
 of Sardinia and Corsica, the lands this side of the Pharos, the Patrimony of 
 Peter in Tuscia, the Duchy of Spoleto, the counties of Venaisin, Sabina, 
 the Marches of Ancona, Massa, Trebaria, Eomandiola, Campania, and the 
 maritime provinces, and their lands and places, and the lands of the special 
 commission of the Arnulphs, and our cities Bologna, Cesena, Eimini, Bene- 
 vento, Perugia, Avignon, Civita Castello, Trederzo, Ferrara, Comachio, 
 and other cities, counties, and places, or rights belonging to the Pioman 
 Church itself, and subject directly or indirectly to the said Roman Church, 
 or who presume de facto to usurp, disturb, retain, and in various ways to 
 interfere with, that supreme jurisdiction over them belonging to Us and 
 to this same Pioman Church. Likewise (do we, &c. &c.) their partisans, 
 favourers, and defenders, who give them assistance, counsel, or favour of 
 whatsoever kind." 
 
 The present remarkably concise version runs as follows : — 
 
 " Those who invade, destroy, retain, either by themselves or by others, 
 the cities, lands, places, or rights belonging to the Eoman Church, or who 
 usurp, disturb, and retain supreme jurisdiction over them, or who give 
 ' ad singida prcedicta ' help, counsel, or favour." 
 
 Ad ecclesiam Bomanam jpertinentia, " belonging to the 
 Eoman Church," says the new Canon. What does belong to 
 the Eoman Church now ? Eome herself is " held, invaded, 
 occupied." And it is grievous to see our clause literally 
 pronouncing excommunication over the Pope and his Car- 
 dinals themselves. For is it not they who do "retain the 
 supreme jurisdiction " in whatever still, apparently at least, 
 belongs to the Church ? However, the Pope may disregard 
 even anathemas. Can he not " loose " ? 
 
 Thus much for the new edition of the Bulla Ccentv, which, 
 in spite of Clement XIV. having declared it "unchristian 
 and dangerous," in spite of Joseph II.'s order to " tear it out 
 of the Eituals," silently kept its place for a hundred years — 
 awaiting that resurrection which has now come. At no
 
 280 ArOSTOLICiE SED1S. 
 
 time, however, has it been a favourite. Many patriarchs, 
 bishops, and archbishops would not hear of it on any account, 
 though they were ordered to publish it in their dioceses- 
 nay, fell under the very ban of excommunication by not 
 doing so. Thus Archbishop Afire writes : " Quant a la 
 Bulle 'In Coona Domini' on ne reprochait pas an clerge de 
 France d'avoir voulu la promulguer. Et, en effet, il n'v a 
 jamais pense." The Council of Trent had certainly made 
 the "Bull " rather illusory by granting, in its twenty-fourth 
 sitting, the power of absolving from all secret reserved cases, 
 to every bishop. This privilege was, however, withdrawn by 
 Pius V. and Gregory XIII. In the middle of the seven- 
 teenth century much wrangling again restored this right to 
 the bishops. They now received the permission (" Quin- 
 quennial Faculties ") to absolve from all reserved cases, open 
 or secret, including heresy. And still the Bull was not 
 liked, and still none would tolerate it. If previously Philip 
 II. had turned the Nuntius who came as its bearer out of 
 Spain ; if France, Portugal, and even Rudolph II. of Ger- 
 many had prohibited its publication ; its end came when 
 Clement XIII. saw fit to pronounce the anathema over 
 Ferdinand of Parma, in 1768. Its introduction into France 
 was nearly made a crimen Isesse majestatis. The same was 
 done in Portugal, where the Crown Fiscal damned the Breve 
 as " contrary to the Gospel, which had inculcated obedience 
 to Cajsar." Maria Theresa followed fiercely. Ferdinand 
 VII. of Naples banished both the Bull and the priests who 
 presumed to take it seriously, out of his states. The Duke 
 of Parma issued a decree which branded the Bull as a source 
 of rebellion and useless banishments, and annulled it. The 
 same was done by Monaco, Genoa, Venice. Maria Theresa 
 sent a special edict to Lombardy to warn the printers and 
 possessors of this document. The " Oekonomaljunta" were 
 authorized to inflict upon such transgressors what punish- 
 ment they pleased. 
 
 Then came Clement XIV. who abrogated it ; and then — 
 exactly a hundred years later — Pius IX. who renewed it in
 
 APOSTOLIC^) SEDIS. 281 
 
 the shape now before us. We can but briefly glance at the 
 rest of the edict, which embodies what obsolete " extra " 
 cases it has been deemed proper thus solemnly to revive, 
 referring such of our readers as are eager for more details to 
 Mansi, Phillips, Hefele, Le Bret, Hausmann, Eaumer, and 
 the acts and histories of the Church generally. Cursed are, 
 again, e.g. those who defend, even privately, propositions 
 condemned by the Pope — which applies especially to the 
 "Syllabus" Cursed are they who lay violent hands, "at 
 the instigation of the devil," on "monks of either sex," — 
 which is the aboriginal " Percussio clerici" in the very 
 words of 1130. Cursed are they who "perpetrate" a duel, 
 as well as all participators and abettors thereof, and those 
 who do not prevent them, if they can, " be they even of 
 royal or imperial dignity." This prohibition dates, in the 
 shape of a Bull, from Leo, in 1519, and extended even to 
 spectators, who were mulcted in many ducats. Cursed are, 
 further, all Freemasons and Carbonari. It was at the 
 Council of Avignon, in 1325, that all secret societies were 
 first condemned. But Freemasons as such, of whose exist- 
 ence Clement XII. " had heard a rumour," were especially 
 anathematized by him in a Bull. And the inquisitors re- 
 ceived strict orders to look after the orthodoxy of the sup- 
 posed Brethren. Benedict XIV. renewed this "Constitution," 
 giving six reasons for so doing, and its last Papal confirma- 
 tion dates 1816, and is signed Pius IX. 
 
 Many also are the. regulations re-enacted regarding eccle- 
 siastics themselves. Such is the one which prohibits the 
 violation of the " Clausura " by pain of reserved excommuni- 
 cation. Time was when women, by reason of special Papal 
 permits, were free to enter monasteries, there to choose their 
 own confessors : an arrangement which does not seem to 
 have given general satisfaction to the outer world. When 
 the scandal grew too fierce, Pius V. restricted the permission 
 to the monasteries of the congregation of the Holy Virgin 
 " of the Mount." Women might visit those, but only when 
 there was a service, or procession, or a sermon, or burial, or
 
 282 APOSTOLICLE SEDIS. 
 
 any kind of ceremony. And there always was some kind of 
 ceremony. In the course of the eighteenth century, how- 
 ever, this custom of allowing women to visit the refectories 
 and dormitories, " in order to take part in processions and 
 other ceremonies," had spread far beyond the original 
 bounds; — until Benedict XIV., in 1742, issued a new and 
 more stringent Bull. On the other hand, Gregory XIII. 
 had restricted men, as early as 1575, from paying stray 
 visits to nunneries — unless they possessed special licences. 
 As for clerics who had ipso facto the permission of entering 
 nunneries, these were exhorted in that Bull not to make too 
 extensive a use of their privilege, else both they and the 
 nuns who received them would fall under the ban. 
 
 Besides these " cases," which thus seem to have required 
 renewing rather urgently, we meet again with the trading 
 in indulgences, defrauding the Church by obtaining higher 
 prices for masses, and the pilfering of alms — all very ancient 
 institutions. Then we have also simony, of which there are 
 three cases, — " confidential simony " among them. This is 
 rather recent. It appears first in the sixteenth century, and 
 means that somebody hands over his clerical office, which is 
 a certain hindrance to him, to some one else for a life 
 pension. Generally this pension left so little to the real 
 de facto dignitaries that these came to be styled custodini, or 
 even, as at the Councils of Rouen and Narbonne, cistellarii 
 asini, "inasmuch as they bore the burden of office while 
 another ate the fruits thereof." Bishops, archbishops, patri- 
 archs, nay, cardinals themselves, casually obtained benefices 
 in order to resign them, in favour of some one perhaps not 
 yet born, for a consideration. This scandal, too, became 'at 
 last so flagrant that Pius IV., having exhausted all his 
 powers of exhortation, anathematized it : declaring all such 
 benefices accepted in confidentiam null and void ; all con- 
 tracts thereto referring, waste paper; and all those who 
 lived upon the incomes of places which other people held, 
 bound to refund. But this Bull again had to be renewed, 
 because flagrantly disregarded, by Pius V. and by endless
 
 APOSTOLUS SEDIS. 283 
 
 provincial Councils, and was even ordered to be read out 
 aloud every Sunday in church. In cursing this form of 
 simony anew, Pius IX. shows that it flourishes now, as ever. 
 
 Among the " non-reserved " cases we meet the Inquisition, 
 which is not to be " intimidated " or hurt. Curious as this 
 proviso may seem to us, there was a time when it went hard 
 enough with the officers of that institution. Some of them 
 found their deaths in a surprisingly sudden manner, and the 
 Dominicans, who were especially singled out for the function 
 of holy espionage, at one time actually wrote to Innocent IV. 
 begging to be excused for the future. But he would not 
 part with them, and wrote them letters of comfort instead. 
 Pope Pius V., when plain Michael Gislerius, had undertaken 
 to find out something about the Bishop of Bergamo, but he 
 only narrowly escaped being lynched instead. Eemember- 
 ing these things when he ascended the Papal throne, many 
 were the protecting clauses wherewith he surrounded the 
 Inquisition and its officers, down to the lowest menials — as 
 well as all inquisitorial witnesses, accusers, denouncers, spies, 
 &c. Likewise were anathematized by him all those who 
 should touch the inquisitorial houses, properties, churches, 
 and other goods, as well as books, letters, protocols, transac- 
 tions, &c. &c. Another not reserved case of our new Bull 
 treats of those who do not, within a certain time, denounce 
 such confessors or priests by whom they have been instigated 
 to certain disgraceful acts ; and yet another, of those who are 
 instrumental in giving Christian burial to notorious heretics, 
 or such as lie under special excommunication or interdict. 
 To the bishops, or " ordinaries," are left exactly three cases : 
 to wit, married clerical persons of either sex, who, by marry- 
 ing, not only fall under the excommunication themselves, 
 but bring it down also upon the partners of their guilt ; 
 further, those who use forged apostolic letters ; and another, 
 which we prefer not to mention. Among the second division 
 of the excommunications, there is also a clause threatening 
 those who should extract relics from sacred cemeteries or the 
 Roman catacombs ; but we miss the ancient enactment
 
 284 APOSTOLIC/E SEDIS. 
 
 against purloining things from the Vatican. Formerly — 
 since Clement III. — the very porters had to take an oath 
 that they would " neither steal, nor allow to be stolen there- 
 from, relics, gold, silver, gems, pallia, ornaments, books, 
 papers (charhilw), oil, lead, iron, brass, stones, doors, wood, 
 or the tables thereof." The Vatican is better guarded now, 
 and the oath is dispensed with. 
 
 Thus far our notes. Whether the Council now sitting 
 will, or will not, mark an epoch in the history of Rome — 
 whether this " Constitution " itself, some of whose enact- 
 ments may, at one time, have been useful enough, be a mere 
 brutum fulmen, as alleged, or not — we do not pretend to 
 know. But they are both Signs of the Times as singular as 
 they are humiliating.
 
 ( 285 ) 
 
 XIII. 
 THE ROMAN PASSION DRAMA. 
 
 The Eoman " Passion Drama " increases in interest. The 
 world at large, which has hitherto looked on with a sort of 
 languid wonderment akin to contempt, opens its eyes and 
 listens. Instead of rumours more or less contradictory, we 
 have been able to present our readers in the course of the 
 last few days with a series of documents which certainly were 
 worth perusal. There was the petition for the Infallibility 
 — which breathes the spirit, the learning, and the righteous- 
 ness of our own Cardinal in sj)e, Monsignor Manning — signed 
 by a nameless crowd of Italians. Then came the counter- 
 petition, much shorter, very much to the point, full of dignity, 
 and ominous in its bearing ; and it had the signatures of 
 Cardinal Schwarzenberg and the archbishops and bishops 
 of Germany and Hungary. Next we had the manifesto 
 attributed to Cardinal Rauscher, signed by the same, or 
 nearly the same, distinguished prelates, against the Papal 
 order of proceedings, introduced, contrary to all precedents, 
 into this Council : an order which is meant to gag and kill 
 that which is the first condition of a Council — free expression 
 of opinion. Over and above these we have had the protest 
 of "Janus" Dollinger, for which the Municipal Council of 
 Munich have offered him the freedom of their city. 
 
 Perhaps by the time this reaches Rome the contemptuous 
 shout will greet us : — Consummatum est. The Infalliblists 
 are said to be now moving swiftly and surely towards their 
 goal. Organized to perfection, with all and every means at 
 
 1 Re-printed, by permission, from the 'Pall Mall Gazette' of Feb. 10, 1870.
 
 286 THE ROMAN PASSION DRAMA. 
 
 their disposal, and stung to the quick by the sudden danger 
 of losing what already seemed theirs — they have lost no time 
 in gathering all the signatures that were to be got from the 
 episcopal multitudes who depend upon the Papal coffers even 
 for daily bread, and they have carried their petition to the 
 Council. The anti-Infalliblists, broken up into at least five 
 groups of nationalities, hemmed in at every single step, 
 alternately bullied and flattered, believing to the last in the 
 official assurance that the intended proclamation of that 
 dogma was all a myth, hesitated, deliberated, waited. Nay, 
 that very counter-petition, brief as it was, they would not 
 issue until they had held some fifteen or sixteen meetings 
 over it. No wonder the Infalliblists will " have it," when- 
 ever the hour comes. 
 
 That is to say, the majority will outvote the minority. 
 Now it so happens that never since the Council of Nicrea 
 have parties outvoted each other at a Council. Not a single 
 dogma has ever been carried against an opposition. Every 
 single " resolution " was passed either unanimously or not at 
 all. Even at Trent, where, as now at the Vatican, the 
 Council was hectored by an overwhelming number of 
 Italians, some dogmas which Kome had tenderly at heart 
 were, after having already passed all the preliminary stage?, 
 thrown up — simply and solely because some few bishops 
 openly remonstrated. The worst is that — so little did that 
 party which rules the Vatican and the Council dream of the 
 possibility of an opposition — not longer than two years ago 
 one of their first spokesmen, the Jesuit Father Matignon, 
 printed these words : — " Le Concile n'imposait rien a notre 
 foi qui n'eiit obtenu a peu pres Vunanimite des votes. L'obli- 
 gation de croire est une chose si grave, le droit de lier les 
 intelligences est un droit si auguste et si important, que les 
 peres pensaient rien devoir user qu'avec la plus grande 
 reserve et la plus extreme ddlicatesse." 
 
 We do not pretend to foresee what will happen next. The 
 Bishops of Fulda pledged themselves before they went to 
 Eome, saying : " Never shall or can a General Council esta- 
 blish a dogma not contained in Scripture or in the Apostolic
 
 THE ROMAN PASSION DRAMA. 287 
 
 traditions." They have kept their word in trying hard to 
 prevent it. But if they do not succeed, what will be their 
 next step ? For now they will not be in a mood even to 
 decree the bodily assumption of the Yirgin Mary, or to 
 "raise the holy Joseph out of the obscurity in which he 
 has so long and undeservedly languished," as the peti- 
 tions put it which have now reached our own country for 
 signature. 
 
 It may be well on the eve of the new phase to take 
 another glance at these documents before mentioned. There 
 is, first, the petition itself, the sum and substance of all that 
 which the Jesuits have preached from the housetops and in 
 the secret chamber for some twenty years past, for which 
 they have collected money and built churches, monasteries, 
 and convents, and have founded societies and journals and 
 schools from one end of the globe to the other. It is the 
 Unita, the Laacher-Stimmen, Father Schrader, Monsignor 
 Manning, all rolled in one. And what is the gist of it ? — 
 We must have the Infallibility. True, it is not in Scripture 
 any more than in the Fathers. But two Councils, one of 
 which was openly proclaimed at Trent to have been non- 
 oecumenical, have said something which, if garbled and mis- 
 quoted, might look as if they had assumed that Infallibility. 
 Besides which, several provincial synods held within the last 
 twenty years under our own auspices have been made to say 
 something like it. And thus we have on our side the 
 "ancient testimonies of the Church." But, they add, in 
 somewhat anxious loquaciousness, had we known that these 
 Germans were about to oppose us at the last moment we 
 certainly should have taken different steps. There is no 
 special reason why the dogma should be proclaimed just 
 now, or why it should be proclaimed at all. But — we are 
 in for it. To withdraw is impossible. We, you, and the 
 Pope are all committed and compromised as deeply as ever 
 we can be, and it must be passed. If you do not pass it, 
 what will the world say of us ? Think of the newspapers — 
 will they not pretend that they have frightened us out of 
 our dogma ? Nay, the faithful themselves would look upon
 
 288 THE ROMAN PASSION DRAMA. 
 
 us rather suspiciously, if not contemptuously, if we should 
 now back out of what we have inculcated so indefatigably 
 for all these years. Nay, other things would begin to be 
 called in question by them at which we dare not even hint. 
 Yet some say the time is not ripe. The dogma is good, but 
 " inopportune." It will frighten away, they fancy, or pre- 
 tend to fancy, the feeble in Faith within, and the schismatics 
 and heretics without. "Why, this is the very thing we want. 
 Let the traitors in the camp, those rotten leaves, drop off 
 openly. That will only strengthen our hands. As for 
 heretics and schismatics, we fancy they will be rather at- 
 tracted by our unshrinking boldness. They will, in the 
 midst of the dissensions in their own Churches, or in the 
 struggles of their own scepticism, take refuge in what would 
 appear to them to rest on such firm foundations, that which 
 dares all storms, and alone remains unmoved while all else 
 moves right or left. Therefore, it is good, and it is oppor- 
 tune, to make Infallibility as the crown and summit of that 
 proud edifice, the Roman Church. Nay, the Catholic pe< >ple 
 have a right to it. Therefore sign, and sign quickly : Perl- 
 cnhim in mora ! 
 
 "We have shown in our abstract of Dr. Dollinger's protest 
 what mincemeat he made of that document. But for some 
 reason or other he still seems to have left out the most 
 important point when he showed that the two proofs taken 
 from the Councils of Lyons and Florence were rotten to the 
 core. At Lyons, he says, the point in question was not 
 agreed upon, as alleged, by both Greeks and Latins, but the 
 Pope sent a formula to the Emperor Michael Palreologus to 
 sign, wherein the sentence quoted was contained. The 
 Emperor, utterly unable to help himself, signed, but pro- 
 tested. The bishops had absolutely nothing to do with it, 
 they were not even in a position to be asked about it. All 
 this is true enough ; but Dr. Dollinger might have pointed 
 out further that that formula had no more to do with 
 declaring the Pope infallible than with declaring him im- 
 mortal, it being simply and solely intended as a recognition 
 of the long-contested superiority of the Roman Chair to that
 
 THE ROMAN PASSION DRAMA. 289 
 
 of Constantinople. Not long ago the Civilta tried on that 
 passage as a proof that the Pope was superior to the Council. 
 But it was yery soon warned off, if we remember right, in 
 one of that series of papers which appeared in the Times 
 before the opening of the Council. It was there shown how 
 neither Lyons nor Florence had anything to do with that 
 question. The Infalliblists have again " cooked " their 
 passage. They quote : " Subortas de fide controversias de- 
 bere Bomani Pontijicis judicio definiri " — " Discussions on 
 matters of faith must be settled by the judgment of the 
 Koman Pontiff." Bat these two words " Roman Pontiff" do 
 not exist in the original. In the "Symbol" sent by the 
 Pope, and signed by the Emperor, to which the Infalliblists 
 refer, and which begins, " Credimus Sanctam Trinitatem," 
 we find the word suo instead, and that pronoun happens to 
 refer not to the Pontiff, but to the Roman Church, " which 
 before all other Churches is called to defend the truth," and 
 "to which, through Peter, whose successor is the Pope, is 
 given the plenitude of power, the primacy and supremacy 
 over all other Churches." It is always, from beginning to 
 end, the Ecclesia Bomana, and not the Pope. It is she who, 
 "though she has honoured other Churches with privileges, 
 has yet always preserved her own prerogative, both in 
 General Councils and elsewhere." Neither is there, in the 
 oath sworn on that occasion in the name of the Emperor by 
 the Logothetos, the slightest mention made of a Pontiff. It 
 is the Church, and nothing but the Church herself, to which, 
 as such, the Greeks yield the Primacy. As a matter of 
 history, what the Council of Lyons had established in 1274 
 was utterly revoked by the Greeks in 1282, and the very 
 remembrance of it was stamped out. 
 
 As to that notorious Council of Florence, " which some do 
 not blush to babble of as non-oecumenical," Dr. Dollinger 
 has sufficiently shown how the Infalliblists have forged and 
 falsified the quotation taken from that. There is one " defi- 
 nition," however, which they might have quoted, but did 
 not, belonging to that ill-fated Florentine Council — we mean 
 the infallible decree of Eugenius IV., " That the souls of all 
 
 u
 
 290 THE ROMAN PASSION DRAMA, 
 
 those who die in the state of original sin descend to the 
 infernal regions;" which means that all those untold mil- 
 liards of human beings who have not received baptism, 
 whether they have been born before that institution, or have 
 not been discovered by Exeter Hall, go to hell. Let us add 
 at once that many and sore have been the wrigglings of 
 theologians on this point. That religion which is love did 
 seem to deal a little harshly on that point. But they all 
 took comfort finally in this, that it was not an (Ecumenical 
 Council which had said it, only a Pope ; and it was only 
 both together who, according to the catechism as used to 
 this hour, make up Infallibility. Nous avons change tout 
 cela : there is no chance for those poor unbaptized souls 
 now ! 
 
 It is well known now that the two episcopal protests were 
 not permitted to be printed in Rome, while the original 
 petition was issued by the official press. That of Cardinal 
 Schwarzenberg lifts up its voice against the gag upon the 
 freedom of deliberation. It claims this freedom as guaran- 
 teed by the Council of Trent, and the Bishops hint — nay, 
 say — that if the Pope be the head they are the limbs of the 
 Church. Woe unto that head which is separated from its 
 limbs ! Whether it be or be not conscious of its existence 
 after being separated, it certainly does not thrive much after 
 the separation. The other protest, Cardinal Eauscher's, 
 very deliberately sets its face against that pernicious and 
 degrading dogma, as well as against the manner in which 
 the bishops are being bullied into it. Not that the dogma 
 is particularly inopportune, but they will not have it at any 
 time or price. " They know the spirit and temper both of 
 the peoples and the Governments of their native lands," and 
 they raise their protest at this supreme hour to avert what 
 they know to be fraught with "very grave perils to the 
 whole Church." Besides which, they find, in looking " at 
 the genuine documents of the Church," very serious and 
 manifold difficulties. They trust the dogma will not be 
 brought before them in any shape whatsoever, for "their 
 soul recoils " from even discussing it. Of the new " modera-
 
 THE ROMAN PASSION DRAMA. 291 
 
 tion " petition let us, in all charity, be silent. It gives five 
 raisons d'etre, and trembles all over. If we were in the 
 habit of quoting Scripture, we would mention a certain 
 passage which talks of things neither hot nor cold, and what 
 happens to them. So will it happen unto that expression of 
 opinion. 
 
 u 2
 
 ( 293 ) 
 
 XIV. 
 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 1 
 
 Shemitic or rather Semitic languages, a term commonly 
 applied to a certain number of cognate idioms supposed to 
 have been spoken by the Shemites — i.e. the descendants of 
 Sheru. Considering, however, that the Canaanites and the 
 Phcenicians, the Cushites and a number of Arabic tribes, all 
 derived in the genealogical list of Genesis x. from Cham, did 
 speak " Shemitic," while Elam and Lud derived from Shem 
 did not, as far as our present information goes (Ashur has 
 now the benefit of a strong doubt) : — that designation, first 
 advocated by Eichhorn and Schlozer, must be pronounced a 
 complete misnomer, although it has kept its ground up to 
 this moment for sheer want of a precise and accurate term. 
 It has supplanted that other one, used from the Church 
 Fathers downward, of " Oriental Languages ;" a denomina- 
 tion perfectly satisfactory to the " linguistic consciousness " 
 of generations that viewed Hebrew as the mother of all 
 languages, and whose acquaintance with Eastern idioms was 
 limited to this and an imperfect idea of Phcenico-Punic, 
 " Chaldee " — Jewish or Christian — and Arabic. But when, 
 towards the end of the last century, the gigantic discoveries 
 in the realm of Eastern philology suddenly made these 
 idioms shrink into the small proportions of a family of 
 dialects confined for a long period to a narrow corner of the 
 south-west of Asia ; that most comprehensive name of 
 Oriental Languages had, notwithstanding single protests, 
 to be put aside for ever. Leibnitz's suggestion of " Arabic " 
 being too narrow for the whole stock, "Syro- Arabic" formed 
 
 1 lie-printed, by permission, from 'Kitto's Cyclopedia of Historical Literature.
 
 294 OX SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 
 
 in analogy to " Indo-European," was proposed, but that too- 
 lias not been found generally expressive enough, apart from 
 the objection of its being apt to be erroneously understood 
 in a linguistical rather than in a geographical sense. Thus, 
 in default of a better name, the above will probably be 
 retained for some time to come, with the distinct under- 
 standing of its being a false aud merely conventional ex- 
 pression. 
 
 Comparative philology, although, compared with what we 
 now understand by this term, a very embryonic one, exer- 
 cised itself at an early period, and in a vague manner, in 
 these idioms. The resemblance betvyeen them is indeed so 
 striking at first sight — its roots being as nearly identical as 
 can be 1 — that it could hardly have been otherwise. It is the 
 difference between them rather than the similarity that 
 requires a closer scrutiny in order to be discovered at all. 
 As it is, they do not vary among themselves to the extent 
 even of the dialects in any single group of the Indo-Euro- 
 pean languages. Yet, as we shall further show, the idea 
 still entertained by not a few scholars — viz. of one of the 
 Shemitic languages standing in the relation of maternity to 
 another — must now be utterly discarded, and all that can be 
 granted to the speculative " Science of Language " is the 
 possibility of some kind of extinct prototype, out of which 
 they might have individually developed. Exactly as there 
 is an " Idea " (in the Platonic sense) of a primeval mother 
 of all the Indo-European tongues floating before the minds 
 of our modern investigators. 
 
 Meanwhile, the existence of three distinct " Shemitic " 
 dialects of independent existence, each bearing a clearly- 
 marked individuality of its own in historical times, has been 
 established beyond all doubt ; and, as usual, different names 
 and divisions have been proposed for them. The most 
 widely adopted and the most rational ones are those that 
 are taken from the abodes of the different tribes who first 
 spoke them. Thus we have : a. The northern or north- 
 eastern branch — i, e. that of the whole country between the 
 Mediterranean and the Tigris, bordered by the Taurus in
 
 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 295 
 
 the north ; by Phoenicia, the land of Israel, and Arabia, in 
 the south ; and embracing Syria, Mesopotamia (with its 
 different " Arams "), and Babylonia. This is called the 
 " Aramaic " branch, b. The idiom spoken by the inha- 
 bitants of Palestine : " Hebraic." And c. That of the south 
 or the peninsula of Arabia — "Arabic;" the idiom confined 
 to this part up to the time of Mohammed. Auother recent 
 division is the so-called historical, framed in accordance with 
 the preponderance of these special branches at different 
 periods. By this the Hebraic would assume the first place, 
 extending from the earliest times of our knowledge of it 
 down to the sixth century B.C., when the Aramaic begins to 
 take the lead, and the field of Hebrew and Phoenician — 
 the chief representatives of Hebraic — becomes more and 
 more restricted. The Aramaic again would be followed by 
 the Arabic period, dating from the time of Mohammed, 
 when Islam and its conquests spread the language of the 
 Koran, not merely over the whole Shemitic territory, but 
 over a vast portion of the inhabited globe. But this last 
 division is so arbitrary, not to say fallacious — for there is 
 every reason to suppose that "Aramaic " flourished vigorously 
 in its own sphere during, if not before the whole Hebraic 
 period, and again that " Hebraic " (as Phoenician) kept its 
 ground simultaneously with the later " Aramaic " period — 
 that its own authors had to hedge it in with many and 
 variegated restrictions. So that it is, in fact, reduced 
 simply to a " subjective " notion or method, not further to 
 be considered. But we further protest all the more strongly 
 against it, as it might easily lead to the belief that the 
 one idiom gradually merged into the other — Hebrew into 
 Aramaic, Aramaic into Arabic, much as Latin did into the 
 Volgare — which would be utterly contrary to fact. The 
 vulgar Arabic spoken now in Palestine no more developed 
 out of Aramaic, than the English spoken in Ireland de- 
 veloped out of Celtic or " Fenian." 
 
 Sinking for a moment the distinctions between these dif- 
 ferent Shemitic idioms, and viewing them as one compact 
 Unity, more especially in comparison with that other most
 
 296 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 
 
 important family, the Indo-European languages, we are 
 
 struck, as were the Church Fathers and the medieval gram- 
 marians, with more signs of primeval affinity than their 
 mere identity of word-roots. And indeed, if this had con- 
 stituted our sole proof and criterion, the circle of relation- 
 ship would have had to be widened to an astonishingly large 
 extent. One of the chief and indisputable characteristics 
 of Shemitic has, since the days of Ohajug, been held to be 
 their triliteralness. That is, that every word consists, in the 
 lirst instance, merely of three consonants, which form, so to 
 say, the soul of the idea to be expressed by that word ; while 
 the respective special modifications are produced by certain 
 vowels or additional letters. Some of the latter have, in a 
 few instances, remained stationary, but even then they are 
 always clearly distinguishable from the root, as mere casual 
 accessories. But these very additional and only casually 
 annexed consonants have led investigation to doubt that 
 time-hallowed axiom of triliteralness. So far, it has been 
 said, from this being a primeval inborn attribute of these 
 idioms, nay, a sign of their having been handed down (espe- 
 cially in the Hebraic form) as nearly like their original 
 prototype as can be : it is rather a sign of a very advanced 
 stage of development in which they all participated, and 
 which renders them almost as unlike their primitive type as 
 any foreign group of languages. There must have been a 
 time, it is contended, when not three, but two radicals with 
 an intermediate vowel — a monosyllable in fact — formed the 
 staple of some original " Shemitic " language. Out of this 
 they may have sprung simultaneously, by one of those lin- 
 guistic revolutions consequent upon sudden historical events 
 — emigrations and the like. Not indeed in the sharply- 
 outlined form in which we now find them, but predisposed 
 to their development of linguistic individual peculiarities : 
 one and all however bent upon the extension of their mono- 
 syllabic root into a triliteral — in a way that the consonant 
 prefixed should express what nuances an advancing civilisa- 
 tion found it necessary to distinguish in every one of the 
 scanty roots forming the common stock of the whole
 
 OX SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 297 
 
 Shemitic family. These biliterals, to which the roots thus 
 are traced back, are nearly all of an bnomatopoetical nature ; 
 that is, they are imitative sounds of a primitive kind. As 
 long as they were used, the untold grammatical distinctions 
 of an advanced human stage — flexions, categories, construc- 
 tions — could, if they existed at all, only have existed in an 
 embryonic ?\ite. — The authors and defenders of this inge- 
 nious conjecture — the unexpected use of which we shall 
 presently show — fail, however, to answer the question, when 
 and how this most extraordinary step from two to three 
 letters could so suddenly and simultaneously have been 
 introduced as must needs be presupposed. Not one of the 
 monosyllabic languages known to us has ever changed its 
 roots in this extraordinary manner, and the adduced analogy 
 of the quadriliterals having been formed from the triliterals 
 is not to the point. 
 
 Yet this analytical discovery of monosyllabic bases, if it 
 does not assist us as much as was expected in the solution of 
 the many difficult problems offered by the Shemitic idioms 
 when compared among themselves, was made to support a 
 much more sweeping theory —viz. that of an original affinity, 
 nay identity, between Shemitic and Aryan, at some most 
 remote period. A period, in fact, when Aryans and Shem- 
 ites dwelt in the same homesteads ; a period anterior to the 
 final development of the roots of their — common — rudi- 
 mentary language, and, of course, long anterior to gram- 
 mars : and therefore .also called the antegrammatical stage. 
 And this theory has been advocated and warmly defended 
 from Schlegel down to our day by some of the most emi- 
 nently Aryan and Shemitic scholars. Nay, even the absurd 
 extreme to which it has been carried by Delitzsch and Fiirst 
 did not bring its original form into discredit. These two 
 scholars, to wit, do not stop at the affinity, but assume a 
 downright relationship of parentage between the two groups. 
 Their proofs and their specimens of words, however, do not 
 sufficiently support their hypothesis. For the most part arbi- 
 trary to an immense degree, and erroneous in their applica- 
 tion, they resolve themselves either into accidental simi-
 
 29S ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 
 
 larities or iuto such affinities as are easily explained by 
 late importations (the existence of which has never been 
 doubted) from one group into the other — caused by the 
 constant contact between the two families in prehistorical as 
 well as historical times. Quite apart from that other most 
 unfortunate accident of their trying to prove their case by 
 certain Talmudical and Syriac words which bore an un- 
 deniable family-likeness to certain Greek and Latin words 
 of similar meanings ; but which were really words taken 
 from Greek and Latin in late Born an times, and spelt in a 
 slightly disguised Shemitic fashion. 
 
 We cannot in this place further enlarge upon a point 
 which trenches so nearly upon those obscure problems about 
 the origin of language in general, that prominently occupy the 
 minds of scientific inquirers in these days. Whatever be the 
 final issue, if ever there be one, we cannot but simply state 
 the fact that, grammatically, there cannot be a more radical 
 difference than that which exists between the two groups, 
 while lexically or etymologically a certain affinity between 
 them is perfectly incontestable even to the most critical and 
 unprejudiced eye. However different the conclusions they 
 draw, on these points even the most extreme schools agree. 
 But whether, as some hold, there was once a stage where 
 there was no grammar at all, or whether there was a kind of 
 grammar which contained the two subsequently so widely 
 varying forms of it in nuee ; or again whether the two race& 
 ever did inhabit the same soil at all, and whether the pheno- 
 menon of the lexical property common to both may be 
 explained on the one hand by certain linguistical laws that 
 unchangingly rule body and soul of humanity, and produce 
 everywhere the same onomatopoetical sounds, the origin of 
 which we may or may not be able to trace in our present 
 stage, or on the other hand by a certain interchange of 
 ideas and objects at different periods of their existence : — we 
 shall leave undiscussed in this place, content to have shown 
 the different standpoints. The most remarkable, and perhaps 
 the least easily-accounted-for phenomenon, is the striking 
 similarity of the pronouns and numerals, not only in Indo-
 
 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 299 1 
 
 Germanic aud Sheinitic, but even in Coptic, which for this 
 and other reasons has indeed been held by some to be both 
 lexically and grammatically the Chamite link between the 
 two. With what small show of reason, however, we cannot 
 stop to explain. 
 
 Among these last-mentioned curious mutual interchanges 
 that took place in what we may call — comparatively speak- 
 ing — historical times, we find first of all certain Egyptian 
 words that have early crept into Hebrew, partly possibly 
 before the sojourn at Goshen. Thus we find inN* TIN. nyiS? 
 ~P2tf.« perhaps also rQJ1> !H"in, and others, some of them still 
 to be found in Coptic, and not explained by Shemitic 
 etymology. On the other hand, certain words, chiefly 
 designations of animals, are found in Coptic which are taken 
 from Shemitic — ^DJ, -|£0, ^$, ^g, etc. Next stand those 
 verbal importations from India, brought home by the trading 
 expeditions to " Ophir "■ — e.g. D^ilK? syip. "I~)3> DD~G, and the 
 like — which are easily traceable to Sanscrit and its dialects. 
 [And here we would draw attention to the word ]V (Yavan), 
 the Shemitic designation for the Greeks, which seems to be 
 
 the Sanscrit ^J^^Tcf Yuvajana=Lat. juvenis — i.e. a younger 
 branch (of emigrants probably).] Strangely enough, while 
 the Greek was enriched to an extraordinary extent by the 
 Shemitic traders, in proportion to the immense variety of 
 articles then imported into Greek ports ; the Greek idiom is 
 generally supposed to have added next to nothing to the 
 Shemitic before the time of Alexander. Vegetable sub- 
 stances, precious stones, materials for garments, the gar- 
 ments themselves, animals, musical instruments, weights,, 
 and last not least, the letters of the alphabet — all these, 
 together with their native names, were imported by Shem- 
 ites (Phoenicians) into the Greek territory and language, 
 when they first emerged from their narrow West-Asiatic 
 homes and opened up a trade with the whole world. The 
 use of many of these words in the fragments of the most 
 ancient Greek literature that has survived shows them to 
 have been at the earliest period already part and parcel of 
 that idiom to such an extent that even their origin had been
 
 300 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 
 
 completely forgotten, cf. ZWtf vaaanros ; Dt£Q, ftd\<Ta/j,ov ; 
 )")2, fivcro-os ; PUl 1 ?, Xt'fiavos ; T3D, cr«7r(/>e£/90? ; JUTD, x L ™ v > 
 "TUDj KLvvpa, etc. "Whether, however, many of the hitherto 
 unexplained Shemitic words may or may not be Greek, and 
 date from exactly the same period, and their importation be 
 owing to the same causes, we cannot here discuss. 
 
 And leaving altogether the ever-shifting quicksands of 
 this lexical affinity between the two families, which, as we 
 said, cannot but be accepted in the main as an established 
 fact, we come to the more safe and easy ground of their 
 grammatical difference. This may be summed up briefly 
 in the above-mentioned present trilateral nature of the 
 Shemitic roots ; and in the peculiarity of the three con- 
 sonants that constitute them representing the idea, and 
 the ever-changing vowels added to them its ever-changing 
 aspects, varieties, and modifications. The consonants of the 
 Shemitic root form, in this wise, without the accessory 
 vowels, an unpronounceable word, while the Indo-Germanic 
 root or word is complete and self-sufficient. Among further 
 most vital differences between the two, we may point to the 
 totally different way of the declensions of their nouns (cf. 
 the Shemitic status constructus and emphaticus), the nume- 
 rous verbal modes utterly unknown to the Aryan conjuga- 
 tion, the absence of a definite tense in Shemitic, the inability 
 of the latter of forming compound nouns or new nuances of 
 verbs by prepositions, and the like. All of which cripples 
 the action of the Shemitic idioms to no small extent, while 
 the unlimited power of forming words upon words at the 
 spur of the moment, and the marvellous flexibility of the 
 verb and the precision of its tenses, endow the Aryan with 
 unequalled wealth, power, and elegance. 
 
 This most fittingly leads us to the question of the respec- 
 tive " ages " of these two prominent families of languages. 
 Not that to the one or to the other is to be assigned a 
 longer, more ancient term of existence — for this notion of 
 the direct parentage is, as we said, confined to bygone un- 
 scientific centuries, and to the Delitzsch-Furst school : if 
 there be one. But it may fairly be asked — and this is by
 
 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 301 
 
 no means a barren speculation — which may have retained 
 its ancient stamp with greater fidelity, and which thus 
 reflects best the shape of its original ? And there can be 
 but one answer. The more simple, child-like, primitive of 
 the two is, without any doubt, the Shemitic. Abstraction 
 and metaphysics, philosophy and speculation, as we find 
 them in the Aryan, are not easily expressed in an idiom 
 bereft of all real syntactic structure ; bereft further of that 
 infinite variety of little words, particles, conjunctions, aux- 
 iliary verbs, etc., which, ready for any emergency, like so 
 many small living links, imperceptibly bind word to word, 
 phrase to phrase, and period to period : which indeed are 
 the very life and soul of what is called Construction. This 
 want of exactness and precision, moreover, naturally inherent 
 in idioms represented by words of dumb sounds, whose 
 meaning must be determined according to circumstances by 
 a certain limited number of shifting vowels, whose conjuga- 
 tions, though varied and flexible to an extraordinary degree, 
 yet lack a proper distinction between the past and the future 
 (cf. the Hebrew " perfect " and " aorist," which lend them- 
 selves to almost any tense between past and future). There 
 certainly is — who can doubt it ? — notwithstanding all these 
 shortcomings, a strength, a boldness, a picturesqueness, a 
 delicacy of feeling and expression about these Shemitic 
 idioms which marks them, one and all, as the property of a 
 poetically, not to say " prophetically " inspired race. But 
 compare with this the suppleness of Aryan languages and 
 that boundless supply of aids that enable them to produce 
 the most telling combinations at the spur of the moment ; 
 their exquisitely consummate and refined syntactical de- 
 velopment, that can change, and shift, and alter the position 
 of word, and phrase, and sentence, and period, to almost any 
 place, so as to give force to any part of their speech. With 
 all these, and a thousand other faculties and capabilities, 
 they might certainly at first sight almost lead one to the 
 belief that they must have grown upon another stock — the 
 Shemitic — and outgrown it. But discarding this unscientific 
 notion, it cannot be denied that they are the " younger " of
 
 302 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 
 
 the two. The stage of Kealism, as represented by the 
 former, must naturally have preceded that of Idealism, of 
 which the Aryan alone is the proper type and expression. 
 The Shemitic use of the materialistic, "sensual," term for 
 physiological and psychological phenomena must be older 
 than the formation and common usage of the Aryan abstract 
 term. The name for the outward tangible impression which 
 must have everywhere been identical originally with that 
 of the sensation or idea connected with it, has remained 
 identical in the Shemitic from its earliest stage to its final 
 development. It is, in fact, this unity of idea and expres- 
 sion, which, above all other symptoms, forces us irresistibly 
 to place the Shemitic into the first rank as regards " anti- 
 quity," such as we explained it ; that is, of its having re- 
 tained the closest likeness to some original form of human 
 speech that preceded both the other family of language and 
 itself. 
 
 The signs characteristic of the common Shemitic stock 
 have been touched upon already in the foregoing para- 
 graphs, as far as they could be brought to bear upon the 
 questions under consideration. To these we may now add 
 the peculiarity of there being but two genders in Shemitic, 
 and that these are also distinguished in the second and third 
 person of the verb; that, further, the genitive is formed 
 by the juxtaposition merely of the two respective nouns, 
 slightly changed in their vocalisation, while prepositions 
 principally form the other cases, and suffixes indicate the 
 oblique cases of pronouns. 
 
 We shall now, as summarily as possible, speak of the 
 Shemitic idioms in their special branches, and endeavour to 
 point out as we proceed whatever is best fit to throw a light 
 on the many questions respecting their comparative age, 
 development, and history, referring always for fuller details 
 and points beyond our present task to the several articles 
 devoted to them individually in the course of this work. 
 The first and to the Biblical student most important of these 
 idioms, is the middle Shemitic, Hebraic, or Hebrew, the 
 language of the Hebrew people during the time of their
 
 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 303 
 
 independence in Caanan. The term Hebrew (m^) itself 
 has been derived by some from Eber, the father of Peleg 
 and Joktan ; by others from the appellative "l^y, scil. in^H 
 — i.e. the other side of the river Euphrates, whence the 
 Abrahamites immigrated into Canaan (LXX. 6 irepdrrj^). 
 This double derivation is already mentioned in Theodoretus ; 
 other derivations are from y^, to explain, etc. No less 
 have Iberians, Arabians, and other words of similar sound 
 been pressed into the service. The canonical books of the 
 0. T. do not use that term to designate the language, which 
 they call variously )^D nsttf language of Canaan, irj contra- 
 distinction to Egyptian; and JTTliT Jewish, in contra- 
 distinction to Aramaic (or Ashdodian). It first occurs in 
 Ecclesiasticus and Josephus, as eftpaio-ri, ykoorra rwv 
 'Efipaicov. In the N. T., efipaiaTi, eftpaU Siake/cros, means 
 Aramaean, in contradistinction to Greek. Philo, ignorant 
 of the language, calls it jXcoaaav ^aXSaiKrjv. When 
 Aramaic had, after the return from the captivity, become 
 the popular tongue, and Hebrew was chiefly confined to 
 temple, synagogue and academy, it received the name 
 UHpn ]Wb holy language, or more accurately, jn ]j£^> 
 ■NttHpj language of the sanctuary. One of the manv 
 vexed and barren questions connected with it is that regard- 
 ing its original soil — that is, whether Abraham imported it 
 as his own native tongue into Canaan, or whether, finding- 
 it there, he and his descendants merely adopted it. Those 
 who held or hold Hebrew to be, if not the oldest of all 
 languages, the oldest at least of the Shemitic idioms, natu- 
 rally decide for the former view, since it could not but have 
 remained the traditional inheritance of the chosen race. The 
 defenders of the latter view, on the other hand, point to the 
 circumstance that Abraham came from Mesopotamia, where 
 Aramaic was the common idiom used — e.g. by Laban, the 
 grandnephew of Abraham (Gen. xxxi. 47), as a translation 
 of Jacob's Hebrew ; further, to its denomination " language 
 of Canaan," the geographical position of which country, 
 between the Aramaeans and the Arabs, would seem exactly 
 to correspond to the linguistical position of their respective
 
 304 OX SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 
 
 tongues. Again, the close resemblance of the Phoenician to 
 the Hebrew, anil certain proper names of Canaan, such as 
 plJJ'O^Qj I^DOKj and the like, are brought forward in 
 support of this second theory. Yet there is a third — viz. 
 that the idiom itself may first have been fully developed by 
 the Abrahamides in Canaan, who may have neither brought 
 it nor found it there, but from a fusion of their own 
 original " Aramaic " and the Canaanitish language spoken 
 in their new homes produced it and developed it. 
 
 Intimately connected with this question, is the more 
 general one as to the age of this language itself. That it 
 was the aboriginal tongue from which all others have been 
 derived is, as we hinted before, an opinion not in accordance 
 with the uncontested results of modern philology. The 
 argument of the etymology of certain proper names in the 
 early documents of Genesis mtf from riDlN, earth ; rnn from 
 *J7 life, etc.), was already disposed of by Grotius, who held 
 that Moses may have translated them simply into Hebrew 
 according to the genius of this language, and by Clericus, 
 who pointed out how these names were chiefly appellative 
 names, to a great extent given after the events had taken 
 place to which they point. Yet it was further argued, many 
 names (from Kain to Lemech principally) allow of no ety- 
 mology whatsoever, therefore this must be the original 
 tongue of all men. Such most primitive arguments, how- 
 ever, disposed of, we are still left in the utmost uncertainty : 
 and, in the absence of documents and testimonies, we must 
 resign ourselves to give up all hopes of ever arriving at 
 more than vague theories on the subject. Much more to 
 the purpose, however, is the attempt to find out the relative 
 position of Hebrew among its sister idioms. The oldest 
 Shemitic documents that have survived are in Hebrew, and 
 in them we find this language and its structure fully de- 
 veloped; so fully indeed, that what progress we do perceive 
 in it is a downward progress : the beginning of decay. It 
 further bears so distinctive a character of high antiquity, 
 originality, simplicity, and purity — the etymology of its 
 grammatical forms is still at times so clearly visible in it
 
 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 305 
 
 and it aloue, while it has disappeared in the other dialects 
 — that if not the oldest absolutely, it is certainly the one 
 Shemitic tongue which seems to come nearest to the one 
 primitive type of the Shemitic idioms now generally as- 
 sumed. With regard to its lexical and grammatical position 
 it occupies that mean between the Aramaic as the poorest, 
 and the Arabic as the richest. Its principal wealth and 
 strength, however, lie in its religious and ethical element. 
 Whatever may have been lost of its documents and the 
 words which they contained, that which remains is sufficient 
 to show the peculiar tendency and character of its voca- 
 bulary. There are, e.g., fourteen different terms for " ask, 
 inquire," twenty-four for " keep the Law," nine for " trust in 
 God," &c. Of foreign elements we chiefly discover those 
 original terms for foreign objects, persons, or dignities, intro- 
 duced from the Egyptian idiom during, the Mosaic period, 
 and from the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, &c, at later 
 times. Few traces are found of dialectical differences — 
 although there are some of a vulgar idiom (p, ns, Manna, 
 &c.) — while on the other hand the difference between 
 prosaic and poetical diction is most striking. Fuller forms 
 in flexions, suffixes, peculiar formations of nouns, the use of 
 grand epithets, and above all, rare words (mostly Aramaic), 
 are the distinguishing characteristic of its poetry. It loves 
 to draw for peculiarity of expression both upon the ancient 
 and partly obsolete stock of words, and upon the language 
 of the common people: no less than upon dialects of 
 idiomatic affinity. Other poetical peculiarities are the 
 omission of the relative or the use of the demonstrative in 
 its stead, the omission of the article, and the like. 
 
 There is, however insignificant the changes undergone by 
 the Hebrew and the Shemitic languages in general be, as 
 compared with those of Indo-Gerrnanic — and the reasons for 
 this stability of the former are founded in their whole cha- 
 racter and history — yet a certain change noticeable in the 
 Hebrew, as preserved in the 0. T. Whether this be due to 
 the difference of the ages in which the several books were 
 written, or to peculiarities of the respective writers, as some 
 
 X
 
 3UG ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 
 
 hold, seems hardly to allow of a doubt. Whatever may be 
 owing to provincialism, or individuality, or even to the more 
 solemn and therefore different style of poetry — and we 
 cannot always distinguish these things as clearly as we could 
 wish — enough remains to show a gradual and important 
 difference between the earlier and the later stages of the 
 language in the earlier and later books of the 0. T. Certain 
 corresponding periods — two, three, or more — have accord- 
 ingly been assumed. Thus some distinguish between the 
 time before and that after the exile ; others between Mosaic, 
 Davidic, Solomonic periods, and the period after the exile. 
 Yet these divisions are of a most precarious nature. It is 
 quite true that certain words and forms which occur in the 
 Pentateuch do not occur again until very late. That again, 
 terms used at first in prose occur afterwards only in poetry, 
 or have completely changed their forms and meanings. 
 Further it is undoubtedly true that during the Davidian 
 time, and that of his son, the influence of the schools 
 founded by Samuel, and the influence of two such eminent 
 kings and their brilliant literary achievement, together with 
 the flourishing condition of the country itself, could not but 
 make itself felt also in a generally higher and finer cultiva- 
 tion of style, diction, and language, throughout the writings 
 of the period. It must also be allowed that the Assyrian 
 invasion, and all its consequences — principally the spread of 
 Aramaean in Palestine — corrupted the purity of the lan- 
 guage, blunted its sense of grammatical niceties, and caused 
 those who most desperately clung to the ancient style to 
 introduce, instead of the living elements of former days, 
 dead archaisms. But we doubt whether any genuine division 
 can be instituted, as long at least as the now prevailing un- 
 certainty as to the date of certain parts of the Scripture will 
 last — and we fear it will not soon be removed. 
 
 Vague though our notions about the time when Hebrew 
 was first spoken be, we have the clearest dates as to the 
 time of its disappearance as a living language. When at 
 the return from the exile all the ancient institutions were 
 restored, it was found that the people no longer understood 
 
 J
 
 OX SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 307 
 
 their own Scriptures in their vernacular, and a translation 
 into Aramaic (out of which sprang the Targums) had to 
 be added, "so that they might understand them." That 
 Aramaic soon became, as we said, the language of the 
 schools and of public worship almost exclusively, some- 
 what like the Latin in the Middle Ages. 
 
 Closely allied to the Hebrew, as already observed by 
 Augustine, Jerome, and others, is the Phoenician, which in 
 our own days, with the increasing number of monuments 
 brought to light, has risen to high importance. No lan- 
 guage of antiquity perhaps was so widely spread. The 
 whole ancient world almost being the vantage-ground of 
 Phoenician enterprise, the language was naturally dissemi- 
 nated over the widest possible space, and the natural conse- 
 quence was, that gradually yielding to foreign influence it 
 did not keep up its original purity, and became in proportion 
 more and more divergent from the Hebrew. Characteristic 
 to it are certain inflexions it retained, which were long 
 obsolete in Hebrew, no less than certain words and phrases, 
 considered archaic in Hebrew, but of common occurrence in 
 Phoenician. Again, there is a tendency towards a darkening, 
 so to say, of vowels — e. g. the Hebrew a becomes occasionally 
 o, the e becomes * or y, the i changes into y or u, the o 
 into u, and the like. The gutturals are at times inter- 
 changed, consonants are assimilated or omitted, &c. A 
 grammar of this idiom has not been attempted yet, nor does 
 the knowledge of the inflexions which we possess offer suffi- 
 cient material for a systematic investigation at this present 
 moment. A few items towards it, however, are, that the 
 Hebrew termination of the nominative in ah becomes at in 
 Phoenician, that the formation of the pronoun differs, that 
 there is a greater variety of genitive forms in the Phoenician, 
 &c. The abundance of Aramaism noticed in the language 
 may have crept in at a late period only. The surviving 
 remnants consist merely of inscriptions on coins and stones, 
 chiefly discovered in their colonies. Of a written literature 
 nothing has come down to us, save a few proper names and 
 texts imbedded in a fearfully mutilated state in Greek and 
 
 x 2
 
 308 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 
 
 Roman writings, and a few scraps of extracts from their 
 writers, translated into Greek, but of extremely doubtful 
 genuineness. From all we can gather there must have 
 existed an immense number of Phoenician writings at a 
 remote period of antiquity : chiefly of a theological or theo- 
 gonical nature, whose authors were identified with the gods 
 themselves. From the Phoenician is to be distinguished 
 the Punic, a corrupted dialect of it, spoken in the western 
 colonies up to the seventh century a.d., while the mother- 
 tongue had completely died out on its native soil as early as 
 the third century. There was even a translation of the 
 Bible extant in Punic, but not a trace of it has remained. 
 
 We now turn to the northern Shemitic or "Aramaic" 
 branch, spoken between the Mediterranean and the Tigris ; 
 north of Phoenicia, the land of the Israelites, and Arabia ; 
 and south of the Taurus ; a dialect poorer both grammati- 
 cally and phonetically than either of the two others. Its 
 peculiarities, moreover, are much of the nature of provincial- 
 isms, or perhaps even point to a stage of corruption of lan- 
 guage. Thus it is not the change of vowel which produces 
 the passive mood, but a special prefix (ns) ; the article 
 does not begin but end the word ; the sibilants are hardened 
 (cf. liTT, gold ; T)ft, rock ; 2)D, return), etc. The earliest 
 trace of its distinction from the Hebrew is the well-known 
 translation of Jacob's lybz into NJTnn^ ")^\ A very difficult 
 question, and one, Ave fear, not to be solved before further 
 progress in our knowledge of cuneiform literature has been 
 made, is that of the language of Babylonia. That Aramaic 
 was spoken there is undoubted, but whether it was the only 
 idiom prevalent, as in Syria and Mesopotamia, or whether 
 the Chaldseans who had conquered Babylonia had brought 
 with them another non-Shemitic (Medo-Persian) language 
 " akin to the Assyrian," has been the subject of long dis- 
 cussions. But even granted that " Chaldaean " was akin to 
 Assyrian, it need not therefore by any means have been a 
 non-Shemitic language. It is, on the contrary, now assumed 
 almost unanimously to be Shemitic; how far, however, it 
 differs from the other dialects, and in particular what may 
 
 l
 
 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 309 
 
 have been its direct or indirect influence upon Aramaic, we 
 cannot here investigate. 
 
 Considering the vast importance of cuneiform studies — 
 for Shemitic in general, and for our knowledge of Aramaic 
 or " Chaldee " in particular — we shall try briefly to sum up 
 the results hitherto arrived at in this youngest of philo- 
 logical and paleeographical sciences. There are three prin- 
 cipal kinds of cuneiform — a mode of writing, be it observed 
 by the way, principally used for monumental records : a 
 kind of cursive being used for records of minor importance — 
 called respectively the Persian, Median, and Assyrian. The 
 first, which seems to have died out 370 B.C., has from thirty- 
 nine to forty -four alphabetical signs or combinations, which 
 never consist of more than five wedges. Its words are 
 divided by oblique strokes. The language it represents is 
 Indo-Germanic — the mother of Zend. The second, variously 
 called Median, Scythic, &c, and supposed to represent a 
 Turanian dialect, is the least known and the least important. 
 An alphabet of about one hundred syllabic combinations has 
 been constructed out of the very scanty remains in which it 
 appears. The third and most momentous kind, the Assyrian, 
 seems to have spread widest. Not only in Babylon and 
 Nineveh, on the Euphrates and Tigris, but in Egypt itself 
 has it been found. More than four hundred combinations, 
 phonetic, syllabic, and ideographic, have been distinguished 
 in it, although our knowledge is limited to a proportionately 
 small number of them. But the difficulties offered here are 
 of the most extraordinary kind. The spelling is varied con- 
 stantly, the signs occasionally represent different sounds 
 (polyphonous), and the same sounds again are represented 
 by different signs (homophonous). Finally, not one, but 
 five or more dialects have been traced in them; dialects 
 belonging to different tribes or periods. Thus it will be 
 easily understood that many and momentous philological 
 problems await their solution from the progress on this field ; 
 and little but conjecture is as yet allowed on the special 
 points of our present subject. Of a primeval Babylonian 
 literature, however, supposed to be preserved in certain
 
 310 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 
 
 Arabic translations, of which some hopes were entertained 
 of late years, nothing reliable has come to light — although 
 the existence of ancient Babylonian writings on mathematics, 
 astronomy (combined with astrology), and chronology is 
 affirmed by ancient authors. 
 
 Turning, however, to what specimens of " Aramaic " there 
 ire preserved, we first of all find certain dialects represented 
 ui them which have been variously divided into " Chaldee " 
 and "Aramaic," or into "East-Aramaic" and "West- 
 Aramaic," or again, into " Jewish," " Heathen," and " Chris- 
 tian," and finally, into " Palestinian " and " Babylonian " 
 Aramaic. Discarding the term " Chaldee " as liable to give 
 most rise to misunderstanding — it is first found in the Alex- 
 andrines (^aXSai'o-Tt), and was adopted by Jerome — we may, 
 for the sake of brevity, distinguish between Aramaean /VEIN 
 and Syriac (•'DlID- "lil^H "Dyi ]wb), which carry, at least 
 in their present form of writing, the most unmistakable line 
 of demarcation on their face. In the first, the Aramaic 
 (Jewish), we have further to distinguish — a. The Galilean 
 dialect, which seems to have been notorious for its careless- 
 ness in the use and pronunciation of its consonants and 
 vowels. The sounds of K and Ch, P and B, &c, and above 
 all the gutturals, were hardly distinguishable in their speech. 
 Of so little importance, indeed, do these seem to have been, 
 that they are frequently lost altogether, and entirely new 
 sounds and compounds are formed — scarcely to be reduced 
 to any grammatical or logical rule — by the mere vulgarity 
 of an idiom saturated, moreover, with unconglomerated 
 foreign elements to the last degree, b. The Samaritan — i.e. 
 vulgar Hebrew and Aramaean mixed up together, in accord- 
 ance with the genesis of the people itself. It, too, changes 
 its gutturals, uses the y most extensively, and does not dis- 
 tinguish the mute consonants, c. The Jerusalem or Jud&an 
 dialect scarcely ever pronounces the final gutturals ; and has 
 besides many peculiar turns of its own, which show all the 
 symptoms of provincialism, but it boasts of a fuller vocalisa- 
 tion. Its orthography, however, is one of the strangest 
 imaginable. This last is the most important dialect of the
 
 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 311 
 
 three Aramaic ones, for in it the whole gigantic Targumic 
 and (partly) Talmudical literature is written, while of the 
 Samaritan there exist but few documents of a theological, 
 liturgical, and grammatical nature, and the Galilean never 
 had, as far as we know, any literature of its own. We 
 need but briefly mention here the minor (" heathen ") 
 branches, such as Zcibian — standing between Aramaic and 
 Syriac, the language of a mystico-theosophical sect called 
 the Mendaites ( = Gnostics), which is largely mixed with 
 Persian elements, and almost bereft of grammar ; the 
 Palmyrene, a kind of Syriac, written in square Hebraic 
 characters ; and the Egypto- Aramaic, found on some monu- 
 ments (stone of Carpentras, Papyri), probably due to Baby- 
 lonian Jews living in Egypt, who had adopted the religion 
 of their new country. 
 
 All " Ararnsean " literature — in contradistinction to 
 " Syriac " — is, it need hardly be added, Jewish ; from the 
 chapters in Daniel, written in this idiom, to the last remnant 
 penned in Palestine or Babylon (the worship in the temple 
 and the earlier schools being, as we said, the only places for 
 which the " Holy Language" was partly retained), this was 
 the exclusively used popular idiom. It had, in fact, become 
 so popular and universal that it came to be called c E/3 'patent 
 (N. T. passim). How it grew to be so universally adopted 
 has hardly been sufficiently explained as yet ; for the Cap- 
 tivity alone, or even any number of successively returning 
 batches of immigrants from Babylonia, do not quite account 
 for the phenomenon of a seemingly poor and corrupt dialect 
 supplanting so completely that other hallowed by the most 
 sacred traditions, that this became a dead language in its 
 own country. The v fact, however, is undeniable, as at the 
 time of Christ even Scripture itself was popularly only 
 known through the medium of the Aramaic Targums. 
 Nearly all the Shemitisms in the N. T. are Aramaic, and 
 the same may be said with regard to those found in Jo 
 sephus : cf. Matt. v. 22, pa/cd = ^p>1 : xvi. 17, fiap , l(ovd = 
 H2V 11 ; xxvii. 46, rfkl rfkl Xrjfia (rafiayQav'i = r\ti? >! 7N "^N 
 ^np2^ ; 1 Cor. xvi. 22, fiapav add = N/-|N ]"I2 ; Joseph.
 
 312 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 
 
 Antiq. iii. 10. 6, 'Ao-apOd = Nmuy ; iii. 7. 1, ovs Xavaias 
 KaXovcri = N^PD, etc. 
 
 " Syriac " is the designation of an idiom used since the 
 second Christian century in the Church, which, though 
 written in different characters (Estrangelo), is yet so closely 
 akin to Aramaean that up to this day the opinions are 
 divided as to the propriety of making any difference at all 
 between the two. As distinguishing marks between them 
 have boon adduced, principally, the " darker " vocalisation 
 of Syriac — o for a, au or ai for o or i, etc. — its different 
 accentuation, its j as the prefix of the third pers. future for 
 the Aramaic \ the formation of the Syriac infinite by £, 
 and its greater wealth of words, chiefly taken from the 
 Greek; all of which, however, together with other pecu- 
 liarities, are reduced by the advocates of the unity of both 
 dialects to provincial differences and to the peculiar circum- 
 stances of the times. But here again, without entering 
 more fully into the question, we can only venture the state- 
 ment that there seems to be a great prima facie probability 
 at least for their being radically identical ; only let it not be 
 forgotten that in order to be able to form a real judgment 
 it will be first of all necessary that carefully-prepared editions 
 of the literatures of both should be in our hands. Something 
 has been done for the comparatively poor Syriac branch ; f< m 
 the Aramaic, nothing. That, however, the present Maro- 
 nite dialect, as well as those of the Jacobites, Ncstorians, 
 and other Chaldee Christians, is essentially different from 
 both Syriac and Aramaic, is undoubted : just as the vulgar 
 Arabic spoken in Morocco and Algeria differs from classical 
 Arabic. 
 
 The Southern or "Arabic " branch presents to us the most 
 remarkable phenomenon of one special idiom — the Arabic — 
 suddenly, as it were, starting out of utter obscurity as the 
 richest, most complete, and most refined among its sister 
 idioms, at a time comparatively modern, and exactly when 
 the two other branches seemed to have accomplished their 
 mission, and what remained of their life was merely artificial. 
 So exquisitely finished and so boundlessly wealthy, both.
 
 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 31S 1 
 
 lexically and grammatically, has it been from the moment 
 when it first became known, that, as there was no unripe 
 infancy and no struggling growth observable in it, so there 
 was also no age, and far less a decay. It thus ranks as the 
 freshest and " youngest :" precisely in the same sense as the 
 Hebrew may be styled the "oldest" among the Shemitic 
 idioms — not, as we said above, on account of its having in 
 reality preceded the others, or still less of its having given 
 birth to the others, but because for some reason or other its 
 growth stopped at a certain period, and it seems to have 
 retained its ancient physiognomy, while its sister dialects 
 went on developing and renewing themselves as much as in 
 them lay and circumstances permitted. As the Arabic was 
 in the sixth century, so it remained almost unchanged up to 
 our day, except perhaps that in absorbing foreign, especially 
 Greek elements of culture, it did not assimilate them quite 
 in the same congenial manner as an Indo-Germanic idiom 
 would have done. But for all that this language must have 
 an age equal at least to that of the other two sister dialects. 
 There are traces of its peculiarities — peculiarities which 
 divide it as sharply as can be from them — to be found in 
 the earliest records of the 0. T. We have, e.g. the article 
 l\ (the Hebrew [b]n) in TTD 1 ?** (Gen. x. 26), and further 
 in words like Dp^. Wpbti, DE'iabM. lTD^N]. The phe- 
 nomenon, further, of a real declension by the change of the 
 termination of the cases, by certain " broken " plurals, &c, 
 together with many forms of its conjugation, entirely and 
 radically unknown to Shemitic as represented by its other 
 dialects, proves its early and most independent existence. 
 That, further, the Arabs stood in great renown for wisdom r 
 or what we should now call literary proficiency — if this be 
 not a misnomer for a time when writing was unknown among 
 them — in the earliest historical times, seems clear enough 
 from the queen of Sheba's being an Arab queen, the friends 
 of Job being Arabs, and Solomon's own wisdom being com- 
 pared to the wisdom of the Arabs. How it came to pass 
 that absolutely nothing should have survived of all that 
 literature which certainly must have been produced among
 
 314 OX SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 
 
 tliem is a phenomenon no less remarkable. Although two 
 facts must be borne in mind always — viz. that it all was oral, 
 and that it was in verse, or at least in a rhythmical form 
 adapted to those early proverbial sayings and poems of 
 which a vague Arabic tradition still speaks; and Mohammed, 
 for reasons of his own, discouraged, nay condemned, poetry — 
 the sole vehicle of all science, all tradition, all religion, 
 before him, in the "time of ignorance." A comparison 
 between the Arabic and the two other branches most strik- 
 ingly shows that superabundance, lexically and grammati- 
 cally, of the former over the two latter of which we spoke. 
 No one, the Arabs hold, could, without being inspired, keep 
 the whole wealth of their language in his memory. For not 
 only have single words (sword, lion, serpent, etc.), hundreds 
 and thousands of nuances of terms, but many a single word 
 has untold numbers of different meanings. The number of 
 its root and words is like three, respectively ten, to those of 
 the Hebrew — such as the monuments of both now are in our 
 hands. No doubt, had more survived of the Hebrew litera- 
 ture, the proportion would not have been quite as startling 
 — for we now have only fragments of its religious writings 
 to compare with the endless series of historical, poetical, 
 philological, astronomical, and other Arabic literature ; a 
 literature which indeed does not leave a single part of 
 science or belles-lettres uncultivated, and which spreads over 
 about eight hundred years — subsequently to the time of 
 Greece and Rome. Nor can the brilliant Hebrew literature 
 that sprang up in the middle ages, partly through Arabic 
 influence, be taken into account. Arabic, though its "classi- 
 cal " period may be closed with Mohammed, never became 
 Neo-Arabic, while the difference between classical Hebrew 
 and late Hebrew, which had to coin new words at every turn, 
 is quite unmistakable. Arabic grammar shows the same 
 ascendency over that of its sister idioms as does its dic- 
 tionary. It has twice as many forms of conjugation as the 
 Hebrew, itself richer than the Aramaic by the Hiphal, the 
 futurum paragog. and apocop. etc. The Arabic has, besides, 
 over both the advantage of a comparative, and of a dual in
 
 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 315 
 
 the verb. The Hebrew n"V verbs, which in Aramaic are 
 hardly distinguishable from the tf"b, in Arabic split into 
 the two distinct forms of l"^ and '<"'? ; just as many a He- 
 brew root with more than one signification appears in Arabic 
 as a variety of roots, by a slight change of a consonant. 
 Nay, of these, it has five more than the Hebrew and Ara- 
 maic. It has also, through the amplitude of its vocalisa- 
 tion, the charm of a more sonorous, a fuller and richer tone 
 and colour than either. But it must also be acknowledged 
 that the harmonious flow of the more ancient idioms, their 
 unfettered ease and freedom, together with a number of 
 peculiar forms, like the parallelism with its exquisite natural 
 beauty, is lost to a great extent in the Arabic, in which the 
 work of the schools, their pedantic striving after a con- 
 summate correctness of expression, and their rhetorical 
 " painting of the lily," is often painfully clear. But to 
 the Arabic alone is also due the spread of Shemitic — which 
 had been carried atomically, so to speak, by the Phoenicians 
 to the ends of the earth, but which, with a few isolated 
 exceptions, never really struck root anywhere — to an extent 
 never dreamed of by any ancient or even modern language ; 
 a spread that has not ceased yet, but is enlarging its circles 
 from year to year, together with Islam itself. It is, how- 
 ever, as we said, only the last century before Mohammed, 
 that has left us a few traces of pre-Islamic literature. From 
 the time of Mohammed it grew with exotic rapidity into 
 one of the most widely and brilliantly cultivated. It em- 
 braced well nigh all the branches of human knowledge 
 and research. Theology, medicine, philosophy, philology, 
 history, mathematics, geography, astronomy, etc., are most 
 extensively represented — though as yet only a beginning- 
 has been made in making the treasures of information these 
 works contain as widely useful as they might be made. 
 From the fourteenth century, however, the glory of Arabic 
 literature began to wane. 
 
 We have here spoken only of the chief representative of 
 the xVrabic branch, the Arabic itself — still spoken now in 
 the whole south-west of Asia, in tke north and east of
 
 316 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 
 
 Africa, in Malta, partly even in India, and everywhere in 
 fact where Mohammedanism reigns supreme— which was 
 originally the dialect of one tribe only, viz. the Koreish. 
 The ancient traditions speak of Cahtanic and Ismaelitic 
 dialects : but at present we can only make a vague dis- 
 tinction between those of Yemen and of Hedjaz, during the 
 ante-Islamic times. As the Koreish in the north-west were 
 the spokesmen, as it were, of the latter, so the Himyars or 
 Homerites made their dialect the predominant one in the 
 south, until the Koran swept it completely out of Arabia, 
 and, save a few scattered quotations embedded in later 
 writings, and some partly mutilated inscriptions of difficult 
 reading and more difficult understanding, every trace of it 
 in its original form has disappeared. The Ethiopic or Gheez 
 alone, which was spoken up to the fourteenth century in 
 Abyssinia, seemed to have come nearest to it. But con- 
 sidering the scantiness of its own literary remains, which 
 are chiefly of a theological nature (partly unpublished), and 
 as such subject to the influence of foreign (European) mis- 
 sionaries — who also left their imprint upon it in its excep- 
 tional writing from left to right ; considering further the 
 small progress we have as yet made in deciphering the Him- 
 yaritic, nothing- but a very cautious judgment on the relation 
 of the two can be pronounced. The Amharic, a barbarous 
 Gheez dialect, stands, so to say, on the utmost Hue of the 
 Arabic Shemite, and deserves but a passing mention. The 
 idioms of the Gallas, Hamtonga, and a number of other 
 tribes, however, no longer belong to the Shemitic, notwith- 
 standing some outer resemblances which have misled former 
 investigators. 
 
 Respecting the visible representation of the Shemitic 
 Languages, it may be broadly observed that writing, which 
 in no language fully expresses all the sounds in their various 
 shades, has, in the Shemitic Languages this additional im- 
 perfection, that only the consonants — the skeleton of the 
 Avord — are represented by real letters, while the vowels 
 originally are either entirely omitted, or only the longer 
 ones are expressed by certain consonants (mat res lectionis). 

 
 ON SEMITIC LANGUAGES. 317 
 
 It was only at a comparatively late period that also the 
 minor vowels were added in the shape of little strokes and 
 dots above or below the line, but this aid too is only in- 
 tended for less practised readers. Arabic and Hebrew are 
 still commonly written and printed without vowels. Another 
 point is the direction of the IShemitic writing from right to 
 left (of which only modern Ethiopic makes an exception), a 
 peculiarity still inherent in the alternate line of the Boustro- 
 plieclon of the early Greeks. The nearest approach to the 
 most ancient form of the Shemitic characters is found in 
 the Phceniciau, from which also all our European alphabets 
 are derived.

 
 ( 319 ) 
 
 XV. 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 1 
 
 TAKGUM (tWV), from QTin ; Arab. ^ y;, to translate,, 
 explain) ; a Chaldee word of uncertain origin, variously de- 
 rived from the roots D3"), Dpi (comp. Arab. ^L, *j^, &c.), 
 and even identified with the Greek Tpdyrjfia, desert (Fr. 
 drawees), (trop. Tparyrjiicna, twv Xoyeov, Dion. Hal. Bhet. 10, 
 18), which occurs often in the Talmud as NE^E Wft, or 
 KQ^IJI ("such as dates, almonds, nuts," &c. Pes. 119 6): — 
 the general term for the CHALDEE, or, more accurately 
 AEAMAIC VERSIONS of the Old Testament. 
 
 The injunction to " read the Book of the Law before 
 all Israel .... the men, and women, and children, and the 
 strangers," on the Feast of Tabernacles of every Sabbatical 
 year, as a means of solemn instruction and edification, is 
 first found in Deut. xxxi. 10-13. How far the ordinance was 
 observed in early times we have no means of judging. It 
 would appear, however, that such readings did take place in 
 the days of Jeremiah. Certain it is that among the first acts 
 undertaken by Ezra towards the restoration of the primitive 
 religion and public worship is reported his reading " before 
 the congregation, both of men and women " of the returned 
 exiles, " in the Book in the Law of God " (Neh. viii. 2, 8). 
 Aided by those men of learning and eminence with whom, 
 according to tradition, he founded that most important 
 religious and political body called the Great Synagogue, 
 or Men of the Great Assembly (n'rmn DD2D nMN, 536-167), 
 he appears to have succeeded in so firmly establishing 
 
 1 From Dr. Wm. Smith's ' Dictionary of the Bible,' vol. iii.
 
 320 ON THE TABGUMS. 
 
 regular and frequent public readings in the Sacred Records, 
 that later authorities almost unanimously trace this hallowed 
 custom to times immemorial — nay to the time of Moses 
 himself. Such is the statement of Josephus (c. Ap. ii. 17) ; 
 and we read in the Acts, xv. 21, " For Moses of old time 
 hath in every city them that preach him, being read in the 
 synagogue every sabbath-day." So also Jer. Meg. i. 1 : 
 " Ezra has instituted for Israel that the maledictions in the 
 Pentateuch should also be read in public," &c. Further, 
 Meg. 31 b, " Ezra instituted ten things, viz., that there 
 should be readings in the Law also in the afternoon service 
 
 of Sabbath, on the Monday, and on the Thursday, &c 
 
 But was not this instituted before in the desert, as we find 
 ' they went for three days and found no water ' (water mean- 
 ing the Law, as Is. lv. 1 is fancifully explained by the 
 Haggadah), until the ' prophets among them ' arranged the 
 three weekly readings? So Ezra only reinstituted them," 
 comp. also B. Kama, 82 a, &c. To these ancient readings in 
 the Pentateuch were added, in the course of time, readings 
 in the Prophets (in some Babylonian cities even in the 
 Hagiographa), which were called J~iTViDS!"I, Haftaroth ; but 
 when and how these were introduced is still matter of specu- 
 lation. Former investigators (Abudraham, Elias Levita, 
 Vitringa, &c.) almost unanimously trace their origin to the 
 Syrian persecution, during which j all attention to the Law 
 was strictly prohibited, and even all the copies of it that 
 were found were ruthlessly destroyed ; so that, as a sub- 
 stitute for the Pentateuchical Parasha, a somewhat corre- 
 sponding portion of the Prophets was read in the synagogue, 
 and the custom, once introduced, remained fixed. Recent 
 scholars, on the other hand, without much show of reason, 
 as it would appear, variously hold the Haftarah to have 
 sprung from the sermon or homiletic exercise which accom- 
 panied the reading in the Pentateuch, and took its exordium 
 (as Haftarah, by an extraordinary linguistic stretch, is ex- 
 plained by Frankel) from a prophetic passage, adapted in 
 a manner to the Mosaic text under consideration ; or, again, 
 they imagine the Haftarah to have taken its rise sponta- 

 
 ON THE TAKGUMS. 32V 
 
 neously during the exile itself, and that Ezra retained and 
 enforced it in Palestine. 
 
 If, however, the primitive religion was re-established, to- 
 gether with the second Temple, in more than its former 
 vigour, thus enabling the small number of the returned 
 exiles — and these, according to tradition, the lowest of the 
 low, the poor in wealth, in knowledge, and in ancestry, 1 the 
 very outcasts and refuse of the nation as it were 2 — to found 
 upon the ruins of Zion one of the most important and 
 lasting spiritual commonwealths that has ever been known, 
 there was yet one thing which neither authority nor piety, 
 neither academy nor synagogue, could restore to its original 
 power and glory — the Hebrew language. Ere long it was 
 found necessary to translate the national books, in order that 
 the nation from whose midst they had sprung might be able 
 to understand them. And if for the Alexandrine, or rather 
 the whole body of Hellenistic Jews, G-reek translations had 
 to be composed, those who dwelt on the hallowed soil of 
 their forefathers had to receive the sacred word through 
 an Aramaic medium. The word tmsj^, M&phorash, " expla- 
 natorily," "clearly," or, as the A.V. has it, "distinctly," used 
 in the above-quoted passage of Neh. viii. 8, is in the Talmud 
 explained by " Targurn." 3 Thus to Ezra himself is traced 
 the custom of adding translations in the then popular idiom 
 — the Aramaic — to the periodical readings (Jer. Meg. 28 b ; 
 J. Ned. iv., Bab. Ned. i. ; Maim. Hilch. Teph. xii. § 10, &c), 
 
 1 •• Tun kinds of families went up from 
 Babylon : Priests, Levites, Israelites, 
 
 profaned (vv!"I, those -whose fathers 
 are priests, but whose mothers are not 
 lit for priestly marriage) ; proselytes, 
 freedmen, bastards (or rather those 
 
 the Law of God clearly (tniSE), and 
 gave the understanding, so that they 
 understood the reading : ' — 'in the 
 book of the Law ' — this is Mikra, the 
 original reading in the Pentateuch ; 
 ' CTlDO, clearly ' — this is Targuni : 
 
 bom in illegal wedlock); Nethinim g^S' 3 «= Ned - , 3 ? b >- To , ^ 
 (lowest menials of the Temple) ; ^Di^ H? als ° mi S ht be referred the 
 
 ('about whose lineage there is silence,' "J"™ '^her enigmatical passage 
 -of unknown fathers); and *B1DK, f^'3 ^ ^P" 8 ?^ *J*M™ 
 ' foundlings, of unknown father and ! ^a, ' the Law was given to Israel 
 mother' " (Kidd 4 1) m Ibn wntm S and the hol y (Hebrew) 
 
 2 " Ezra on leavin- P.ihvlon made la nguage. Jt wa * a £ am given to them 
 
 Jizra, on leaving Babylon, made ^ ^ dayg of Ezra iQ ^ Aghlirith 
 
 it like unto pure flour " rvpi ri7lD3 ; writing and the Aramaic language." 
 Ob.)- &c. 
 
 3 "'And they read in the book of,
 
 322 OX THE TARGUMS. 
 
 for which he is also reported to have fixed the Sabbaths, the 
 Mondays and Thursdays — the two latter the market and 
 law-days, when the villagers came to town — of every week 
 (Jer. Meg. i. 1 ; Baba Kama, 82 a). The gradual decay of 
 the pure Hebrew vernacular, among the multitude at least, 
 may be accounted for in many ways. The Midrash very 
 strikingly points out, among the characteristics of the long 
 sojourn of Israel in Egypt, that they neither changed their 
 language, nor their names, nor the shape of their garments, 
 during all that time. The bulk of their community — shut 
 up, as it were, in the small province of Goshen, almost 
 exclusively reduced to intercourse with their own race and 
 tribes, devoted only to the pasture of their flocks, and 
 perhaps to the tilling of their soil — were in a condition 
 infinitely more favourable for the retention of all the signs 
 and tokens of their nationality than were the Babylonian 
 captives. The latter scattered up and down the vast empire, 
 seem to have enjoyed everywhere full liberty of intercom- 
 munication with the natives — very similar in many respects 
 to themselves — to have been utterly unrestrained in the 
 exercise of every profession and trade, and even to have 
 risen to the highest offices of state ; and thus, during the 
 comparatively short space, they struck root so firmly in the 
 land of their exile, that when opportunity served, they were, 
 on the whole, loth to return to the Land of Promise. What 
 more natural than that the immigrants under Zerubbabel, and 
 still more those who came with Ezra — several generations of 
 whose ancestors had been settled in Babel — should have 
 brought back with them the Aramaic, if not as their ver- 
 nacular, at all events as an idiom with which they were 
 perfectly familiar, and which they may partly have con- 
 tinued to use as their colloquial language in Palestine, as, in 
 fact, they had had to use it in Babylon ? Continuous later 
 immigrations from the " Captivity " did not fail to reinforce 
 and further to spread the use of the same tongue. All the 
 decrees and official communications addressed to the Jews by 
 their Persian masters were in Aramaic (Ezr. Neh. passim), 
 Judaea being considered only as part of the Syrian satrapy.
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 323 
 
 Nor must it be forgotten that the whole colonists in Palestine 
 (2 K. xvii. 24) were Samaritans, who had come from "Aram 
 and Babel," and who spoke Chaldee ; that intermarriages 
 with women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab had been 
 common (Neh. xiii. 23) ; that Phoenicia, whose merchants 
 (Tyrians, Neh. xiii. 16) appear to have settled in Palestine, 
 and to have established commercial relations with Judsea 
 and Galilee, contains large elements of Chaldee in its own 
 idiom. Thus it came to pass that we find in the Book of 
 Daniel, for instance, a somewhat forced Hebrew, from which, 
 as it would seem, the author gladly lapses into the more 
 familiar Aramaic (comp. ii. 4, &c.) ; that oracles were 
 received by the High-priests Johanan 1 and Simon the Just 2 
 in the Holy of Holies (during the Syrian wars) in Aramaic 
 (Sotah, 33 a) and that, in short, some time before the 
 Hasmonean period, this was the language in which were 
 couched not only popular sayings, proverbs, and the like 
 ("JVin bm- Beresh. E. 107 d; Tanch. 17 a; Midr. Tehill. 
 'Zo d; 51 /, &c. &c), but official and legal documents 
 Olishnah Ketub. 4, 8; Toseftah Sabb. c. 8 ; Edujoth, 8, 4— 
 c. 130 B.C.), even certain prayers 3 — of Babylonian origin pro- 
 bably — and in which books destined for the great mass of 
 the people were written. 4 Thus, indeed, the Hebrew Lan- 
 guage — the "language of Kenaan" (Is. xix. 18), or " Jehu- 
 dith" (2 K. xviii. 26, 28; Is. xxxvi. 11) of the Bible- 
 became more and more the language of the few, the learned, 
 the Holy Language, £Hpn ]wb or, still more exactly, yz^b 
 N^~np JTlj " Language of the Temple," set aside almost 
 
 1 " The youths who went to combat 
 at Antiochia have been victorious." 
 
 - " Perished has the army which 
 the enemy thought to lead against the 
 Temple." 
 
 3 Introduction to the Haggadah for 
 
 the Pesach (XJOn 1 ? NH3) : ' : Such was 
 the bread of misery which our fathers 
 ate in the land of Mizrajim. Whoever 
 needy, he come and eat with us ; 
 
 Kaddish, to which afterwards a certain 
 signification as a prayer for the dead 
 was given, and which begins as fol- 
 lows : Let there be magnified and 
 sanctified the Great Name in the 
 world which He lias created according 
 to His will, and which He rules as 
 His kingdom, during your life and 
 your days, and the life of the whole 
 house of Israel, speedily and in a near 
 
 whoever is in want, he come and cele- j t ™ e ' + il nd sa > T 7 e ' ; Amen : ^e the 
 brate the Pesach. This vear here, Great Name praised for ever and ever- 
 next year in the land of Israel ; this , more ' 6iC - 
 yeai slaves, next year free men." The I 4 Megillath Taanith, &c. 
 
 Y 'I
 
 324 
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 exclusively for the holy service of religion : be it the Divine 
 Law and the works in which this was contained (like the 
 Mislmah, the Boraithot, Mechilta, Sifri, Sifra, the older 
 Midrashim, and very many portions of the Talmud), or the 
 correspondence between the different academies (witness the 
 Hebrew letter sent from Jerusalem to Alexandria about 100 
 B.C., Chag. Jer. ii. 2), or be it the sacred worship itself in 
 temple and synagogue, which was almost entirely carried on 
 in pure Hebrew. 
 
 If the common people thus gradually had lost all know- 
 ledge of the tongue in which were written the books to be 
 read to them, it naturally followed (in order "that they 
 might understand them") that recourse must be had to a 
 translation into the idiom with which they were familiar — 
 the Aramaic. That further, since a bare translation could 
 not in all cases suffice, it was necessary to add to the trans- 
 lation an explanation, more particularly of the more difficult 
 and obscure passages. Both translation and explanation 
 were designated by the term Targum. In the course of 
 time there sprang up a guild, whose special office it was 
 to act as interpreters in both senses (Meturgeman 1 ), while 
 formerly the learned alone volunteered their services. These 
 interpreters were subjected to certain bonds and regulations 
 as to the form and substance of their renderings. Thus 
 (comp. Mishnah Meg. passim ; Mass. Sofer. xi. 1 ; Maimon. 
 Hilch. Tephill. 12, § 11 ff; Orach Chaj. 145, 1, 2), "neither 
 the reader nor the interpreter are to raise their voices one 
 above the other ; " " they have to wait for each other until 
 eacli have finished his verse ; " " the Meturgeman is not 
 to lean against a pillar or a beam, but to stand with fear and 
 with reverence; " " he is not to use a written Targum, but he 
 is to deliver his translation vive voce " — lest it might appear 
 that he was reading out of the Torah itself, and thus the 
 Scriptures be held responsible for what are his oivn dicta ; 
 " no more than one verse in the Pentateuch, and three in 
 
 1 parnno. p:nin. Mnsaiwi (At. 
 
 c+^s* 
 
 )' ; Ann. Sargmaniel ; Ital. 
 
 Turcimanno; Fr. Truehement ; Engl. 
 Dragoman, &c.
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 325 
 
 the Prophets [a greater licence is given for the Book of 
 Esther] shall be read and translated at a time ; " " that there 
 should be not more than one reader and one interpreter for 
 the Law, while for the Prophets one reader and one inter- 
 preter, or two interpreters, are allowed," &c. (comp. Cor. xiv. 
 21 ff ; xii. 30 ; 27, 28). Again (Mishnah Meg. and Tosiftah, 
 acl loc), certain passages liable to give offence to the multi- 
 tude are specified, which may be read in the synagogue and 
 translated ; others, which may be read but not translated ; 
 others, again, which may neither be read nor translated. 
 To the first class 1 belong the account of the Creation — a 
 subject not to be discussed publicly, on account of its most 
 vital bearing upon the relation between the Creator and the 
 Kosmos, and the nature of both : the deed of Lot and his 
 two daughters (Gen. xix. 31) ; of Judah and Tamar (Gen. 
 xxxviii.) ; the first account of the making of the golden calf 
 (Ex. xxxii.) ; all the curses in the Law ; the deed of Amnon 
 and Tamar (2 Sam. xiii.) ; of Absalom with his father's con- 
 cubines (2 Sam. xvi. 22) ; the story of the woman of Gibeah 
 (Judg. xix.). These are to be read and translated — being 
 mostly deeds which carried their own punishments with 
 them. To be read but not translated are 2 the deed of 
 Beuben with his father's concubine (Gen. xxv. 22) ; the 
 latter portion of the story of the golden calf (Ex. xxxii.) ; 
 the benediction of the priests (on account of its awful 
 nature). And neither to be read nor translated are the 
 deed of David and Bathsheba (2 Sam. xi. and xii.), and 
 according to one the story of Amnon and Tamar (2 Sam. 
 xiii.). (Both the latter stories, however, are, in Mishnah Meg. 
 iv. 10, enumerated among those of the second class, which 
 are to be read but not translated.) 
 
 Altogether these Meturgemanim do not seem to have been 
 held generally in very high respect ; one of the reasons 
 being probably that they were paid (two Selaim at one time, 
 according to Midr. B. Gen. 98), and thus made (what P. 
 
 Comprised in the mnemonic formula, n£c'J Jpy fbl (^ e S- 25 a).
 
 326 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 Aboth especially inveighs against) the Torali " a spade to 
 dig with it." " No sign of blessing," it was said, moreover, 
 "could rest upon the profit they made by their calling, 
 since it was money earned on the Sabbath" (Pes. 4 b). 
 Persons unfit to be readers, as those whose clothes were 
 so torn and ragged that their limbs became visible through 
 the rents (nms), their appearance thus not corresponding to 
 the reverence due to the sacred word itself, or blind men, 
 were admitted to the office of a Meturgeman ; and, apart 
 from there not being the slightest authority attached to 
 their interpretations, they were liable to be stopped and 
 silenced, publicly and ignominiously, whenever they seemed 
 to overstep the bounds of discretion. At what time the 
 regulation that they should not be under fifty years of age 
 in odd reference to the " men of fifty," Is. iii. 3, mentioned 
 in Juchas. 44, 2) came into use, we are not able to decide. 
 The Mishnah certainly speaks even of a minor (under thirteen 
 years) as being allowed both to read and to act as a 
 Meturgeman (coinp. Mishnah Meg. passim). Altogether they 
 appear to have borne the character of empty-headed, bom- 
 bastic fools. Thus Midr. Koh. has to Eccl. vii. 5: '"It 
 is better to hear the rebuke of the wise : ' — these are the 
 preachers (Darshanim) — ' than for a man to hear the song 
 of fools : ' — these are the Meturgemanim, who raise their 
 voices in sing-song, ("VliQj or with empty fancies) : — ' that 
 the people may hear.' " And to ix. 17 : " ' The words of 
 wise men are heard in quiet ' — these are the preachers (Dar- 
 shanim) — ' more than the cry of him that ruleth among 
 fools ' — these are the Meturgemanim who stand above the. 
 congregation." And though both passages may refer more 
 especially to those Meturgemanim (Emoras, speakers, ex- 
 pounders) who at a later period stood by the side of the 
 ChacJiam, or president of the Academy, the preacher kot 
 e^o^yjv (himself seated on a raised dai's), and repeated with 
 a loud voice, and enlarged upon what the latter had whis- 
 pered into their ear in Hebrew (jinny }wb "lb ItflT) 1 ? DDFT, 
 comp. Matt. x. 27, " What ye hear in the ear, that preach ye 
 upon the housetops "), yet there is an abundance of instances
 
 ON THE TAEGUMS. 327 
 
 to show that the Meturgeinan at the side of the reader was 
 exposed to rebukes of a nature, and is spoken of in a manner, 
 not likely to be employed towards any but men low in the 
 social scale. 
 
 A fair notion of what was considered a proper Targum 
 may be gathered from the maxim preserved in the Talmud 
 (Kidd. 49, a) : " Whosoever translates [as Meturgeman] a 
 verse in its closely exact form [without proper regard to its 
 real meaning] is a liar, and whoever adds to it is impious and 
 a blasphemer: e.g. the literal rendering into Chaldee of the 
 verse, ' They saw the God of Israel ' (Ex. xxiv. 10), is as 
 wrong a translation as ' They saw the angel of God ; ' the 
 proper rendering being, ' They saw the glory of the God of 
 Israel.' " Other instances are found in the Mishnah (Meg. 
 iv. 8) ; " Whosoever renders the text (Lev. xviii. 21) ' And 
 thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to 
 Molech,' by ' Thou shalt not give thy seed to be carried over 
 to heathenism (or to an Ararnite woman) ' \i.e. as the Gemara 
 ad he. ; Jer. Sanh. 8, and Sifri on Deut. xxiii. 10, explain it, 
 one who marries an Aramaic woman ; for although she may 
 become a proselyte, she is yet sure to bear enemies to him 
 and to God, since the mother will in the end carry his 
 children over to idolatrous worship] ; as also he who enlarges 
 upon (or figuratively explains) the sections relative to incest 
 (Lev. xviii.) — he shall forthwith be silenced and publicly 
 rebuked." Again (comp. Jer. Ber. v. 1 ; Meg. iv. 10), 
 "Those who translate 'O my people, children of Israel, as 
 I am merciful in heaven, so shall ye be merciful on 
 earth : ' — ' Cow or ewe, it and her young ye shall not kill 
 in one day ' (Lev. xxii. 28) — they do not well, for they 
 represent the Laws of God [whose reasons no man dare 
 try to fathom] as mere axioms of mercy ;" and, it is added, 
 " the short-sighted and the frivolous will say, ' Lo ! to a 
 bird's-nest He extends His mercy, but not to yonder 
 miserable man ....'" 
 
 The same causes which, in the course of time, led to the 
 writing down — after many centuries of oral transmission — of 
 the whole body of the Traditional Law, the very name of
 
 328 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 which (,13 byiV miA " oral law," in contradistinction to 
 uj~ID2ltf mm, or " written law ") seemed to imply that it, 
 6hould never become a fixed, immutable code, engendered 
 also, and about the same period, as it would appear, written 
 Targums : for certain portions of the Bible, at least. 1 
 
 The fear of the adulterations and mutilations which the 
 Divine Word— amid the troubles within and without the 
 Commonwealth — must undergo at the hands of incompetent 
 or impious exponents, broke through the rule, that the 
 Targum should only be oral, lest w it might acquire undue 
 authority (comp. Mishnah Meg. iv. 5, 10 ; Tosifta, ib. 3 ; Jei\ 
 Meg. 4, 1 ; Bab. Meg. 24 a ; Sota, 39 &). Thus, if a Targum 
 of Job is mentioned (Sab. 115 a; Tr. Soferiin, 5, 15; Tosifta 
 Sab. c. 14 ; Jer. Sabb. 16, 1) as having been highly dis- 
 approved by Gamaliel the Elder (middle of first century 
 a.d.), who caused it to be hidden and buried out of sight : — 
 we find, on the other hand, at the end of the second century, 
 the practice of reading the Targum generally commended, 
 and somewhat later Jehoshua ben Levi enjoins it as a special 
 duty upon his sons. The Mishnah even contains regulations 
 about the manner (Jad. iv. 5) in which the Targum is to be 
 written. But even in their written, and, as we may presume, 
 authoritatively approved form, the Targums were of com- 
 paratively small weight, and of no canonical value whatso- 
 ever. The Sabbath was not to be broken for their sake as it 
 was lawful to do for the Scripture in the original Hebrew 
 (Sab. 115 a). The Targum does not defile the hands (for 
 the purpose of touching consecrated food) as do the Chaldi e 
 portions of Ezra and Nehemiah (Yad. iv. 5). 
 
 The gradual growth of the Code of the written Targum, 
 such as now embraces almost the whole of the O.T., and 
 contains, we may presume, but few snatches of the primitive- 
 Targums, is shrouded in deep obscurity. We shall not fail 
 
 1 As, according to Frankel, the | were originally left untranslated. 
 
 LXX. was only a partial translation Saadia iu a similar manner uses the 
 
 at first. Witness the ci infusion in the | /•„„„,„! „ .it : r „ i». \» ;.. 
 i j. i c-r, i i-i. toi in vuas jtXJtX) or syj,\ VV^ in 
 
 last chapters of Exodus, which, as mere | ^^ tr™ 
 
 repetitions (of chaps, xxv. and xxix.), j repetitions.
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 329 
 
 to indicate the opinions arrived at as to the date and author- 
 ship of the individual versions in their due places ; but we 
 must warn the reader beforehand, that no positive results 
 have been attained as yet, save that nearly all the names and 
 dates hitherto commonly attached to them must he rejected. 
 And we fear that, as long at least as the Targuni shares the 
 fate of the LXX., the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Midrash, 
 the Talmud, &c. : — viz., that a really critical edition remains 
 a thing occasionally dreamt of, but never attempted ; — so 
 long must we abandon the hope of getting any nearer a 
 final solution of this and many other still more important 
 questions. The utter corruption, moreover, of the Targum, 
 bitterly complained of already by Elias Levita — (an author, 
 be it observed, of very moderate attainments, but absurdly 
 overrated by certain of his contemporaries, and by those who 
 copied his usually shallow dicta without previous exami- 
 nation) — debars us from more than half its use. And yet 
 how fertile its study could be made ; what light it might be 
 made capable of throwing upon the Bible itself, upon the 
 history of the earliest development of Biblical studies, ver- 
 sions, and upon the Midrash — both the Halachah and Hag- 
 gadah — snatches of which, in their, as it were, liquid stages,. 
 lie embedded in the Tanmms : — all this we need not urge 
 here at length. 
 
 Before, however, entering into a more detailed account, we 
 must first dwell for a short time on the Midrash 1 itself, of 
 which the Targum forms part. 
 
 The centre of all mental activity and religious action 
 among the Jewish community, after the return from Babylon, 
 was the Scriptural Canon collected by the Soferim, or men 
 of the Great Synagogue. These formed the chief authority 
 on the civil and religious law, and their authority was the 
 Pentateuch. Their office as expounders and commentators 
 
 1 VTm (Arab. , -..Jco), first used ""mb , The compilers of Chronicles 
 ^TJ I seem to nave used such promiscuous 
 
 in 2 Chr. xiii. 22, xxiv. 27 ; " Com- ; works treating of biblical personages 
 montary," in the sense of Cajsar's and events, provided they contained 
 " Commentaries," enlargement, em- aught that served the tendency of the 
 bellishment, complement, &c. (A. V. book.
 
 330 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 of the Sacred Eecords was twofold. They had, firstly, to 
 explain the exact meaning of such prohibitions and ordinances 
 contained in the Mosaic Books as seemed not explicit enough 
 for the multitude, and the precise application of which in 
 former days, had been forgotten during the Captivity. Thus, 
 e.g. general terms, like the " work " forbidden on the Sabbath, 
 were by them specified and particularized ; not indeed accord- 
 ing to their own arbitrary and individual views, but according 
 to tradition traced back to Sinai itself. Secondly, laws 
 neither specially contained nor even indicated in the Penta- 
 teuch were inaugurated by them according to the new wants 
 of the times and the ever-shifting necessities of the growing 
 Commonwealth (Geseroth, Tekanoth). Nor were the latter 
 in all cases given on the sole authority of the Synod ; but 
 they were in most cases traditional, and certain special letters 
 or signs in the Scriptures, seemingly superfluous or out of 
 place where they stood, were, according to fixed herme- 
 neutical rules, understood to indicate the inhibitions and 
 prohibitions (Gedarim, "Fences"), newly issued and fixed. 
 But Scripture, which had for this purpose to be studied most 
 minutely and unremittingly — the most careful and scru- 
 tinizing attention being paid even to its outward form and 
 semblance — was also used, and more especially in its non- 
 legal, prophetical parts, for homiletic purposes, as a wide 
 field of themes for lectures, sermons, and religious discourses, 
 both in and out of the Synagogue : — at every solemnity in 
 public and private life. This juridical and homiletical ex- 
 pounding and interpreting of Scripture — the germs of both 
 of which are found still closely intertwined and bound up 
 with each other in the Targum — is called darash, and the 
 avalanche of Jewish literature which began silently to gather 
 from the time of the return from the exile and went on rolling 
 uninterruptedly — however dread the events which befel the 
 nation — until about a thousand years after the destruction of 
 the second Temple, may be comprised under the general 
 name Midrash — "expounding." The two chief branches 
 indicated are, Halachah ("|^n, "to go"), the rule by which 
 to go, = binding, authoritative law; and Haggadah ("OH,
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 331 
 
 " to say ") = saying, legend, — flights of fancy, darting up from 
 the Divine word. The Halachah, treating more especially 
 the Pentateuch as the legal part of the 0. T., bears towards 
 this book the relation of an amplified and annotated Code ; 
 these amplifications and annotations, be it well understood, 
 not being new laws, formerly unheard of, deduced in an 
 arbitrary and fanciful manner from Scripture, but supposed 
 to be simultaneous oral revelations hinted at in the Scripture : 
 in any case representing not the human but the Divine inter- 
 pretation, handed down through a named authority (Kabbah, 
 Shemata — " something received, heard "). The Haggadah, 
 on the other hand, held especial sway over the wide field of 
 ethical, poetical, prophetical, and historical elements of the 
 O. T., but was free even to interpret its legal and historical 
 passages fancifully and allegorically. The whole Bible, with 
 all its tones and colours, belonged to the Haggadah, and this 
 whole Bible she transformed into an endless series of themes 
 for her most wonderful and capricious variations. "Pro- 
 phetess of the Exile," she took up the hallowed verse, word 
 or letter, and, as the Halachah pointed out in it a special 
 ordinance, she, by a most ingenious exegetical process of her 
 own, showed to the wonder-struck multitude how the woeful 
 events under which they then groaned were hinted at in it, 
 and how in a manner it predicted even their future issue. 
 The aim of the Haggadah being the purely momentary one 
 of elevating, comforting, edifying its audience for the time 
 being, it did not pretend to possess the slightest authority. As 
 its method was capricious and arbitrary, so its cultivation 
 was open to every one whose heart prompted him. It is saga, 
 tale, gnome, parable, allegory, — poetry, in short, of its own 
 most strange kind, springing up from the sacred soil of 
 Scripture, wild, luxuriant, and tangled, like a primeval 
 tropical forest. If the Halachah used the Scriptural word as 
 a last and most awful resort, against which there was no 
 further appeal, the Haggadah used it as the golden nail on 
 which to hang its gorgeous tapestry : as introduction, refrain, 
 text, or fundamental stanza for a gloss ; and if the former 
 was the iron bulwark around the nationality of Israel, which
 
 532 
 
 ON THE TABGUMS. 
 
 every one was ready at every moment to defend to bis last 
 breath, tbe latter was a maze of flowery walks witbin tbose 
 fortress-walls. That gradually tbe Raggaclah preponderated 
 and became the Midrash tear i^o^v of the people, is not sur- 
 prising. We shall notice bow eacb successive Targum 
 became more and more impregnated with its essence, and 
 from a version became a succession of short bomiletics. This 
 difference between the two branches of Midrash is strikingly 
 pointed in the following Talmudical story : "R. Chia b. Abba, 
 a Halaehist, and li. Abbahu, a Haggadist, once came 
 together into a city and preached. The people flocked to 
 the latter, while the former's discourses remained without a 
 hearer. Thereupon the Haggadist comforted the Halaehist 
 with a parable. Two merchants come into a city and spread 
 their wares, — the one rare pearls and precious stones ; the 
 other a ribbon, a ring, glittering trinkets : around whom will 
 the multitude throng ? . . . Formerly, when life was not yet 
 bitter labour, the people had leisure for the deep word of the 
 Law ; now it stands in need of comfortings and blessings." 
 
 The first collections of the Halachah — embracing the 
 whole field of juridico-political, religious, and practical life, 
 both of the individual and of the nation : the human and 
 Divine law to its most minute and insignificant details — were 
 instituted by Hillel, Akiba, and Simon B. Gamaliel ; but the 
 final redaction of the general code, Mishnah, 1 to which the 
 later Toseftahs and Boraithas form supplements, is due to 
 Jehudah Hannassi in 220 a.d. Of an earlier date with 
 respect to the contents, but committed to writing in later 
 times, are the three books : Sifra, or Torath Kohanim (an 
 amplification of Leviticus), Sifri (of Numbers and Deutero- 
 nomy), and Mechiltha (of a portion of Exodus). The masters 
 of the Mishnaic period, after the Soferim, are the Tannaim, 
 who were followed by the Amoraim. The discussions and 
 further amplifications of the Mishnah by the latter, form the 
 
 1 Mishnah, from shana, " to learn," 
 " learning," not, as erroneously trans- 
 lated of old, and repeated ever since, 
 Aevrepwffis, "repetition;" but corre- 
 sponding exactly with Talmud, (from 
 
 lamad, "to learn"), and Torah (from 
 In, nit), "to teach:" all three terms 
 meaning " the study,'" by way of emi- 
 nence.
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 333 
 
 Gemara (Complement), a work extant in two redactions, viz. 
 that of Palestine or Jerusalem (middle of 4th century), and 
 of Babylon (5th century a.d.), which, together with the 
 Mishnah, are comprised under the name Talmud. Here, how- 
 ever, though the work is ostensibly devoted to Halaehah, an 
 almost equal share is allowed to Haggaclah. The Hagga- 
 distic mode of treatment was threefold : either the simple 
 understanding of words and things (Peshat) or the homiletic 
 application, holding up the mirror of Scripture to the present 
 (Derush), or a mystic interpretation (Sod), the second of 
 which chiefly found its way into the Targum. On its minute 
 division into special and general, ethical, historical, esoteric, 
 &c, Haggadah, we cannot enter here. Suffice it to add that 
 the most extensive collections of it which have survived are 
 Midrash Kabbah (commenced about 700, concluded about 
 1100 a.d.), comprising the Pentateuch and the five Megilloth, 
 and the Pesikta (about 700 a.d.), which contains the most 
 complete cycle of Pericopes, but the very existence of which 
 had until lately been forgotten, surprisingly enough, through 
 the very extracts made from it (Jalkut, Pesikta Eabbathi, 
 Sutarta, &c). 
 
 From this indispensable digression we return to the subject 
 of Targum. The Targums now extant are as follows : — 
 
 I. Targum on the Pentateuch, known as that of Onkelos. 
 
 II. Targum on the first and last prophets, known as that 
 of Jonathan ben Uzziel. 
 
 III. Targum on the Pentateuch, likewise known as that of 
 Jonathan ben Uzziel. 
 
 IV. Targum on portions of the Pentateuch, known as 
 Targum Jerushalmi. 
 
 V. Targums on the Hagiographa, ascribed to Joseph the 
 Blind, viz. : — 
 
 1. Targum on Psalms, Job, Proverbs. 
 
 2. Targum on the five Megilloth (Song of Songs, Buth, 
 Lamentations, Esther, Ecclesiastes). 
 
 3. Two (not three, as commonly stated) other Targums to 
 Esther : a smaller and a larger, the latter known as Targum 
 Sheni, or Second Targum.
 
 334 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 VI; Targum to Chronicles. 
 
 VII. Targum to Daniel, known from an unpublished 
 Persian extract, and hitherto not received among the 
 number. 
 
 VIII. Targum on the Apocryphal pieces of Esther. 
 
 We have hinted before that neither any of the names 
 under which the Targums hitherto went, nor any of the dates 
 handed down with them, have stood the test of recent 
 scrutiny. Let it, however, not for a moment be supposed 
 that a sceptic Wolfian school has been at work, and with 
 hypercritical and wanton malice has tried to annihilate the 
 hallowed names of Onkelos, Jonathan, and Joseph the Blind. 
 It will be seen from what follows that most of these names 
 have or may have a true historical foundation and meaning ; 
 but uncritical ages and ignorant scribes have perverted this 
 meaning, and a succession of most extraordinary misreadings 
 and strangest varepa irpoTepa — some even of a very modern 
 date — have produced rare confusion, and a chain of assertions 
 which dissolve before the first steady gaze. That, notwith- 
 standing all this, the implicit belief in the old names and 
 dates still reigns supreme will surprise no one who has been 
 accustomed to see the most striking and undeniable results 
 of investigation and criticism quietly ignored by contem- 
 poraries, and forgotten by generations which followed, so that 
 the same work had to be done very many times over again 
 before a certain fact was allowed to be such. 
 
 We shall follow the order indicated above : — 
 
 I. The Targum: of Onkelos. 
 
 It will be necessary, before we discuss this work itself, to 
 speak of the person of its reputed author as far as it con- 
 cerns us here. There are few more contested questions in 
 the whole province of Biblical, nay general literature, than 
 those raised on this head. Did an Onkelos ever exist ? Was 
 there more than one Onkelos ? Was Onkelos the real form 
 of his name? Did he translate the Bible at all, or part of
 
 ON THE TAEGUMS. 335 
 
 it ? And is this Targum the translation he made ? Do the 
 dates of his life and this Targum tally ? &c. &c. The ancient 
 accounts of Onkelos are avowedly of the most corrupted and 
 confused kind : so much so that both ancient and modern 
 investigators have failed to reconcile and amend them so as 
 to gain general satisfaction, and opinions remain widely 
 divergent. This being the case, we think it our duty to lay 
 the whole — not very voluminous — evidence, collected both 
 from the body of Talmudical and post-Talmudical (so-called 
 Rabbinical) and patristic writings before the reader, in order 
 that he may judge for himself how far the conclusions to 
 which we shall point may be right. 
 
 The first mention of " Onkelos " — a name variously derived 
 from Nicolaus (Geiger), "Ovo/u,a koXos [sic] (Renan), Homim- 
 culus, Avunculus, &c. — more fully " Onkelos the Proselyte," 
 is found in the Tosiftah, a work drawn up shortly after the 
 Mishnah. Here we learn (1) that " Onkelos the Proselyte " 
 was so serious in his adherence to the newly-adopted (Jewish) 
 faith, that he threw his share in his paternal inheritance into 
 the Dead Sea (Tos. Demai, vi. 9). (2.) At the funeral of 
 Gamaliel the Elder (1st century a.d.) he burnt more than 
 70 minse worth of spices in his honour (Tos. Shabb. 8). (3.) 
 This same story is repeated, with variations (Tos. Semach. 
 8). (4.) He is finally mentioned, by way of corroboration to 
 different Halachas, in connexion with Gamaliel, in three 
 more places, which complete our references from the Tosiftah 
 (Tos. Mikv. 6, 1 ; Kelim, iii. 2, 2; Chag. 3, 1). The Baby- 
 lonian Talmud, the source to which we turn our attention 
 next, mentions the name Onkelos four times : (1.) As 
 " Onkelos the Proselyte, the son of Kalonikos " (Callinicus ? 
 Cleonicus ?), the son of Titus' sister, who, intending to become 
 a convert, conjured up the ghosts of Titus, Balaam, and 
 Christ [the latter name is doubtful], in order to ask them 
 what nation was considered the first in the other world. 
 Their answer that Israel was the favoured one decided him 
 (Gitt. 56). (2.) As "Onkelos the son of Kalonymus" 
 (Cleonymus?) (Aboda Sar. 11 a). It is there related of 
 him that the emperor (Kaisar) sent three Roman cohorts to
 
 336 ON THE TARGTJMS. 
 
 capture him, and that he converted tlieni all. (3.) In Baba 
 Bathra 99 a (Boraitha), " Onkelos the Proselyte " is quoted 
 as an authority on the question of the form of the Cherubim. 
 And (4) the most important passage — because on it and 
 it alone, in the wide realm of ancient literature, has been 
 founded the general belief that Onkelos is the author of the 
 Targum now current under this name — is found in Meg. 3 a. 
 It reads as follows : " B. Jeremiah, and, according to others, 
 R. Chia bar Abba, said : The Targum to the Pentateuch was 
 made by the ' Proselyte Onkelos,' from the mouth of R. 
 Eliezer and B. Jehoshua; the Targum to the Prophets was 
 made by Jonathan ben Uzziel from the mouth of Haggai, 
 Zechariah, and Malachi. . . . But have we not been taught 
 that the Targum existed from the time of Ezra ? . . . Only 
 that it was forgotten, and Onkelos restored it." No mention 
 whatever is to be found of Onkelos either in the Jerusalem 
 Talmud, redacted about a hundred years before the Baby- 
 lonian, nor in the Church fathers — an item of negative 
 evidence to which we shall presently draw further attention. 
 In a Midrash collection, completed about the middle of the 
 12th century, we find again "Onkelos the Proselyte" asking 
 an old man, "Whether that was all the love God bore 
 towards a proselyte, that he promised to give him bread and 
 a garment ? Whereupon the old man replied that this was 
 all for which the Patriarch Jacob prayed (Gen. xxviii. 20)." 
 The Book Zohar, of late and very uncertain date, makes 
 w Onkelos " a disciple of Hillel and Shammai. Finally, a 
 MS., also of a very late and uncertain date, in the library of 
 the Leipzig Senate (B. H. 17), relates of " Onkelos, the 
 nephew of Titus," that he asked the emperor's advice as to 
 what merchandise he thought it was profitable to trade in. 
 The emperor told him that that should be bought which 
 was cheap in the market, since it was sure to rise in price. 
 Whereupon Onkelos went on his way. He repaired to Jeru- 
 salem, and studied the Law under B. Eleazar and R. Jehoshua, 
 and his face became wan. When he returned to the court, 
 one of the courtiers observed the pallor of his countenance, 
 and said to Titus, " Onkelos appears to have studied the Law." 

 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 337 
 
 Interrogated by Titus, lie admitted the fact, adding that he 
 had done it by his advice. No nation had ever been so 
 exalted, and none was now held cheaper among the nations 
 than Israel : " therefore," he said, " I concluded that in the 
 end none would be of higher price." 
 
 This is all the information to be found in ancient autho- 
 rities about Onkelos and the Targum which bears his name. 
 Surprisingly enough, the latter is well known to the Babylo- 
 nian Talmud (whether to the Jerusalem Talmud is question- 
 able) and the Midrashim, and is often quoted, but never once 
 as Targum Onkelos. The quotations from it are invariably 
 introduced with irS^nnDlD, '" As we [Babylonians] trans- 
 late;" and the version itself is called (e.g. Kiddush. 49 a) 
 pi Dl^nrij " Our Targum," exactly as Ephraim Syrus {Opp. 
 i. 380) speaks of the Peshito as " Our translation." 
 
 Yet we find on the other hand another current version 
 invariably quoted in the Talmud by the name of its known 
 author, viz. D^py DJ1A "the [Greek] Version of Akilas:" a 
 circumstance which, by showing that it was customary to 
 quote the author by name, excites suspicion as to the relation 
 of Onkelos to the Targum Onkelos. Still more surprising, 
 however, is, as far as the person of Onkelos is concerned 
 (whatever be the discrepancies in the above accounts), the 
 similarity between the incidents related of him and those 
 related of Akilas. The latter (D^py. D^pN) is said, both 
 in Sifra (Lev. xxv. 7) and the Jerusalem Talmud (Demai, 
 xxvii. d), to have been born in Pontus, to have been a prose- 
 lyte, to have thrown his paternal inheritance into an asphalt 
 lake (T. Jer. Demai, 25 d), to have translated the Torah 
 before R. Eliezer and E. Joshua, who praised him ("\Dbp, in 
 allusion perhaps to his name, D^py) ; or, according to the 
 other accounts, before R. Akiba (comp. Jer. Kidd. 1, 1, 2, &c. ; 
 Jer. Meg. 1, 11 ; Babli Meg. 3 a). We learn further that he 
 lived in the time of Hadrian (Chag. 2, 1), that he was the 
 son of the Emperor's sister (Tanch. 28, 1), that he became 
 a convert against the Emperor's will (ib. and Shern. Eaba, 
 146 c), and that he consulted Eliezer and Jehoshua about his 
 conversion (Ber. R. 78 d ; comp. Midr. Koh. 102 b). First he 
 
 z
 
 338 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 is said to have gone to the former, and to have asked him 
 whether that was all the love God bore a proselyte, that He 
 promised him bread and a garment (Gen. xxviii. 20). " See," 
 he said, "what exquisite birds and other delicacies I now 
 have: even my slaves do not care for them any longer." 
 Whereupon E. Eliezer became wroth, and said, " Is that 
 for which Jacob prayed, ' And give me bread to eat and a 
 garment to wear,' so small in thine eyes ? — Comes he, the 
 proselyte, and receives these things without any trouble!" — 
 And Akilas, dissatisfied, left the irate Master and went to 
 R. Joshua. He pacified him, and explained to him that 
 *' Bread " meant the Divine Law, and " Garment," the Talith, 
 or sacred garment to be worn during prayer. " And not 
 this alone, he continued, but the Proselyte may marry his 
 daughter to a Priest, and his offspring may become a High- 
 Priest, and offer burnt offerings in the Sanctuary." More 
 striking still is a Greek quotation from Onl-elos, the Chaldee 
 translator (Midr. Echa, 58 c), which in reality is found in 
 and quoted (Midr. Shir hashir. 27 d) from Akilas, the Greek 
 translator. 
 
 That Akilas is no other than Aquila (A/cvXas), the well- 
 known Greek translator of the Old Testament, we need hardly 
 add. He is a native of Pontus (Iron. adv. Hxr. 3, 24 ; Jer. 
 Be Vir. Ill c. 54 ; Philastr. Be Em: § 90). He lived under 
 Hadrian (Epiph. Be Pond, et Mens. § 12). He is called the 
 irevdepiSes (Chron. Alex. ir€v6ep6<i) of the Emperor (ib. § 14), 
 becomes a convert to Judaism (§ 15), whence he is called the 
 Proselyte (Iren. ib. ; Jerome to Is. viii. 14, &c), and receives 
 instructions from Akiba (Jer. ib.). He translated the 0. T„ 
 and his Version was considered of the highest import and 
 authority among the Jews, especially those unacquainted with 
 the Hebrew language (Euseb. Prsep. Ev. 1. c. ; Augustin, 
 Civ. B. xv. 23; Philastr. Em. 90; Justin. Novell 146). 
 Thirteen distinct quotations 1 from this Version are preserved 
 
 1 Greelc quotations: — Gen. xvii. 1, 
 in Beresh. Eab. 51 b ; Lev. xxiii. 40, 
 Jer. Succah, 3, 5, fol. 53 d (comp. 
 Vaj. Eab. 200 d) ; Is. iii. 20, Jer. 
 Shabb. 6, 4, fol. 8b; Ez. xvi. 10, Midr. 
 
 Thren. 58 c ; Ez. xxiii. 43, Vaj. Rah. 
 203 d: Ps. xlviii. 15 (Masor. T., xlvii. 
 according to LXX.), Jer. Meg. 2. 3, 
 fol. 73 b : Piov. xviii. 21, Vaj. Rab. 
 fol. 203 b; Estb. i. G, Midr. Esth.
 
 ON THE TAKGUMS. 339 
 
 in Talmud and Midrash, and they tally, for the most part, 
 with the corresponding passages preserved in the Hexapla; 
 and for those even which do not agree, there is no need to 
 have recourse to corruptions. We know from Jerome (on 
 Ezek. iii. 15) that Aquila prepared a further edition of his 
 Version, called by the Jews tear a,Kpt/3eiav, and there is no 
 reason why we should not assume, cseteris paribus, that the 
 differing passages belong to the different editions. 
 
 If then there can be no reasonable doubt as to the identity 
 of Aquila and Akilas, we may well now go a step further, and 
 from the threefold accounts adduced — so strikingly parallel 
 even in their anachronisms and contortions — safely argue 
 the identity, as of Akilas and Aquila, so of Onkelos, ' the 
 translator,' with Akilas or Aquila. Whether in reality a 
 proselyte of that name had been in existence at an earlier 
 date — a circumstance which might explain part of the con- 
 tradictory statements; and whether the difference of the 
 forms is produced through the y (ng, nk), with which we 
 find the name sometimes spelt, or the Babylonian manner, 
 occasionally to insert an n, as in Adrianus, which we always 
 find spelt Awdrianus in the Babylonian Talmud ; or whether 
 we are to read G-amaliel II. for Gamaliel the Elder, we 
 cannot here examine ; anything connected with the person of 
 an Onkelos no longer concerns us, since he is not the author 
 of the Targum ; that it was so, being, as we saw, only once 
 ascribed to him in the passage of the Babylonian Talmud 
 (Meg. 3 a), palpably corrupted from the Jerusalem Talmud 
 (Meg. i. 9). And not before the 9th century (Pirke der. Eliezer 
 to Gen. xlv. 27) does this mischievous mistake seem to have 
 struck root, while even from that time three centuries elapsed, 
 during which the Version was quoted often enough, without 
 its authorship being ascribed to Onkelos. 
 
 From all this it follows that those who, in the face of this 
 overwhelming mass of evidence, would fain retain Onkelos 
 in the false position of translator of our Targum, must be 
 
 120 d; Dan. v. 5, Jer. Joma, 3, 8, fol. 
 41a. — Hebrew quotations, re-translated 
 from the Greek:— Lev. six. 20, Jer. 
 Kid. i. 1, fol. 59 a ; Dan. viii. 13, Ber. 
 
 Eab. 24c. — Clialdee quotations :— Prov. 
 xxv. 11 ; Beresh. Kab. 104 b; Is. v. 6, 
 Midr. Koh. 113, c, d. 
 
 z 2
 
 340 ON THE TAEGUMS. 
 
 ready to admit that there were two men living simultaneously 
 of most astoundingly similar names ; both proselytes to Ju- 
 daism, both translators of the Bible, both disciples of R. 
 Eliezer and R. Jehoshua ; it being of both reported by the 
 same authorities that they translated the Bible, and that 
 they were disciples of the two last-mentioned Doctors; both 
 supposed to be nephews of the reigning emperor who dis- 
 approved of their conversion (for this account comp. Dion 
 lxvii. 14, and Deb. Rab. 2 ; where Domitian is related to 
 have had a near relative executed for his inclining towards 
 Judaism), and very many more palpable improbabilities of 
 the same description. 
 
 The question now remains, why was this Targum called 
 that of Onkelos or Akilas ? It is neither a translation of it, 
 nor is it at all done in the same spirit. All that we learn 
 about the Greek Version shows us that its chief aim and 
 purpose was to counteract the LXX. The latter had at 
 that time become a mass of arbitrary corruptions — especially 
 with respect to the Messianic passages — as well on the Chris- 
 tian as on the Jewish side. It was requisite that a trans- 
 lation, scrupulously literal should be given into the hands 
 of those who were unable to read the original. Aquila, the 
 disciple, according to one account, of Akiba — the same Akiba 
 who expounded (darasli) for Halachistic purposes the seem- 
 ingly most insignificant Particles in the Scriptures (e.g. the 
 JIN, sign of accusative; Gen. R. 1; Tos. Sheb. 1; Talm. 
 Sheb. 26 a) — fulfilled his task according to his master's method. 
 " Non solum verba sed et etymologias verborum transferre 
 conatus est ... . Quod Hebraei non solum habent apdpa sed 
 et 7rp6ap0pa, ille /ca/co^X&j? et syllabas interpretetur et lit— 
 teras, dictatque a v v rbv ovpavbv koX <jvv tjjv <yrjv quod 
 graeca et latina lingua non recipit " (3ev.de Opt. Gen. interpret). 
 Targum Onkelos, on the other hand, is, if not quite a 
 paraphrase, yet one of the very freest versions. Nor do the 
 two translations, with rare exceptions, agree even as to the 
 renderings of proper nouns, which each occasionally likes to 
 transform into something else. But there is a reason. The 
 Jews in possession of this most slavishly accurate Greek 
 Bible-text, could now on the one hand successfully combat
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 341 
 
 arguments, brought against them from interpolated LXX. 
 passages, and on the other follow the expoundings of the 
 School and the Halachah, based upon the letter of the Law, 
 as closely as if they had understood the original itself. That 
 a version of this description often marred the sense, mattered 
 less in times anything but favourable to the literal meaning 
 of the Bible. It thus gradually became such a favourite with 
 the people, that its renderings were household words. If 
 the day when the LXX. was made was considered a day of 
 distress like the one on which the golden calf was cast, and 
 was actually entered among the fast days (8th Tebeth ; Meg. 
 Taanith) — this new version, which was to dispel the mis- 
 chievous influences of the older, earned for its author one of 
 the most delicate compliments in the manner of the time. 
 The verse of the Scripture (Ps. xlv. 3), " Thou art more 
 beautiful {jofjejita) than the sons of men," was applied to 
 him — in allusion to Gen. ix. 27, where it is said that Japhet 
 {i.e. the Greek language) should one day dwell in the tents 
 of Shem {i.e. Israel), Meg. 1, 11, 71 b and c ; 9 b, Ber. Eab. 
 40 b. — Ovrco yap 'A/cuXa? Sovkevcov rfj e(3pa'Licf} A.e|et e/cSiScotcev 
 eliritiv . . . <f)i\oTifAOT€pov "jreTTUTTevfievos irapa 'lovBaiots, rjpfxe- 
 vevtcivaL ti)v <ypa$r)v, &c (Orig. ad Afric. 2). 
 
 What, under these circumstances, is more natural than to 
 suppose that the new Chaldee Version — at least as excellent 
 in its way as the Greek — was started under the name which 
 had become expressive of the type and ideal of a Bible- 
 translation; that, in fact, it should be called a Targum done 
 in the manner of Aquila: — Aquila-Targum. Whether the 
 title of recommendation was, in consideration of the merits 
 of the work upon which it was bestowed, gladly endorsed and 
 retained — or, for aught we know, was not bestowed upon it 
 until it was generally found to be of such surpassing merit, 
 we need not stop to argue. 
 
 Being thus deprived of the dates which a close examina- 
 tion into the accounts of a translator's life might have fur- 
 nished us, we must needs try to fix the time of our Targum 
 as approximately as we can by the circumstances under 
 which it took its rise, and by the quotations from it which
 
 342 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 we meet in early works. Without unnecessarily going ' into 
 detail, we shall briefly record, what we said in the intro- 
 duction, that the Targum was begun to be committed to 
 writing about the end of the 2nd century, a.d. So far, how- 
 ever, from its superseding the oral Targum at once, it was 
 on the contrary strictly forbidden to read it in public (Jer. 
 Meg. 4, 1). Nor was there any uniformity in the version. 
 Down to the middle of the 2nd century we find the masters 
 most materially differing from each other with respect to the 
 Targum of certain passages (Seb. 54 a), and translations 
 quoted not to be found in any of our Targums. The neces- 
 sity must thus have pressed itself upon the attention of the 
 spiritual leaders of the people to put a stop to the fluctu- 
 ating state of a version, which, in the course of time must 
 needs have become naturally surrounded with a halo of au- 
 thority little short of that of the original itself. We shall 
 thus not be far wrong in placing the work of collecting the 
 different fragments with their variants, and reducing them 
 into one — finally authorized Version — about the end of the 
 3rd, or the beginning of the 4th century, and in assigning 
 Babylon to it as the birthplace. It was at Babylon, that 
 about this time the light of learning, extinguished in the 
 blood-stained fields of Palestine, shone with threefold vigour. 
 The Academy at Nahardea, founded according to legend 
 during the Babylonian exile itself, had gathered strength in 
 the same degree as the numerous Palestinian schools began 
 to decline, aud when in 259 a.d. that most ancient school 
 was destroyed, there were three others simultaneously flou- 
 rishing in its stead : — Tiberias, whither the college of Pales- 
 tinian Jabneh had been transferred in the time of Ga- 
 maliel III. (200) ; Sora, founded by Chasda of Kafri (293) ; 
 and Pumbadita founded by E. Jehudah b. Jecheskeel (297). 
 And in Babylon for well nigh a thousand years " the crown 
 of the Law" remained, and to Babylon, the seat of the 
 "Head of the Golah" (Dispersion), all Israel, scattered to 
 the ends of the earth, looked for its spiritual guidance. That 
 one of the first deeds of those Schools must have been the 
 fixing of the Targum, as soon as the fixing of it became
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 343 
 
 indispensable, we may well presume ; and as we see the text 
 fluctuating down to the middle of the 2nd century, we must 
 needs assume that the redaction took place as soon after- 
 wards as may reasonably be supposed. Further corrobo- 
 rative arguments are found for Babylon as the place of its 
 final redaction, although Palestine was the country where 
 it grew and developed itself. Many grammatical and idio- 
 matical signs — the substance itself, i.e. the words, being- 
 Palestinian — point, as far as the scanty materials in our 
 hands permit us to draw conclusions as to the true state of 
 language in Babylon, to that country. The Targum further 
 exhibits a greater linguistic similarity with the Babylonian, 
 than with the Palestinian Gemara. Again, terms are found 
 in it which the Talmud distinctly mentions as peculiar to 
 Babylon, 1 not to mention Persian words, which on Babylo- 
 nian soil easily found their way into our work. One of the 
 most striking hints is the unvarying translation of the Targum 
 of the word -)m, " River," by Euphrates, the River of Ba- 
 bylon. Need we further point to the terms above mentioned, 
 under which the Targum is exclusively quoted in the Talmud 
 and the Midrashim of Babylon, viz., "Our Targum." "As 
 we translate," or its later designation (Arucb, Rashi, Tosafoth, 
 &c.) as the " Targum of Babel " ? Were a further proof 
 needed, it might be found in the fact that the two Babylonian 
 Schools, which, holding different readings in various places 
 of the Scripture, as individual traditions of their own, con- 
 sequently held different readings in the Targum ever since 
 the time of its redaction. 
 
 The opinions developed here are shared more or less by 
 some of the most competent scholars of our day : for instance, 
 Zunz (who now repudiates the dictum laid down in his 
 Gottesdienstl. Vortr., that the translation of Onkelos dates 
 from about the middle of the first century, a.d. ; comp. 
 Zeitschr. 1843, p. 179, note 3), Gratz, Levy, Herzfeld, Geiger, 
 Prankel, &c. The history of the investigation of the Targums, 
 more especially that of Onkelos, presents the usual spectacle 
 
 1 my:, "a girl," is rendered by N^l ; "for thus they call iu Babylon a 
 young girl," J02"l Kpti^ b222 pip pK> (Chag. 13 a).
 
 3-14 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 of vague speculations and widely contradictory notions, held 
 by different investigators at different times. Suffice it to 
 mention that of old authorities, Reuchlin puts the date of the 
 Targum as far back as the time of Isaiah — notwithstanding 
 that the people, as we are distinctly told, did not understand 
 even a few Aramaic words in the time of Jeremiah. Follow- 
 ing Asaria de Rossi and Eliah Levita (who, for reasons 
 now completely disposed of, assumed the Targum to have 
 first taken its rise in Babylon during the Captivity), 
 Bellarmin, Sixtus Senensis, Aldret, Bartolocci, Rich. Simon, 
 Hottinger, Walton, Thos. Smith, Pearson, Allix, Wharton, 
 Prideaux, Schickard, take the same view with individual 
 modifications. Pfeiffer, B. Meyer, Steph. Morinus, on the 
 other hand, place its date at an extremely late period, and 
 assign it to Palestine. Another School held that the Targum 
 was not written until after the time of the Talmud — so Wolf, 
 Havermann, partly Rich. Simon, Hornbeck, Joh. Morinus, 
 &c. : and their reasons are both the occurrence of " Tal- 
 mudical Fables " in the Targum and the silence of the 
 Fathers. The former is an argument to which no reply 
 is needed, since we do not see what it can be meant to 
 prove, unless the "Rabbinus Talmud" has floated before 
 their eyes, who, according to ' Henricus Seynensis Capucinns ' 
 (Ann. Eccl. torn. i. 261), must have written all this gigantic 
 literature, ranging over a thousand years, out of his own 
 head, in which case, indeed, every dictum on record, dating 
 before or after the compilation of the Talmud, and in the 
 least resembling a passage or story contained therein, must 
 be a plagiarism from its sole venerable author. The latter 
 argument, viz. the silence of the Fathers, more especially 
 of Origen, Jerome, and Epiphanius, has been answered by 
 Walton ; and what we have said will further corroborate his 
 arguments to the effect, that they did not mention it, not 
 because it did not exist in their days, but because they either 
 knew nothing of it, or did not understand it. In the person 
 of an Onkelos, a Chaldee translator, the belief has been 
 general, and will remain so, as long as the ordinary Hand- 
 books — with rare exceptions — do not care to notice the
 
 ON THE TAEGUMS. 345 
 
 uncontested results of contemporary investigation. How 
 scholars within the last century have endeavoured to re- 
 concile the contradictory accounts about Onkelos, more par- 
 ticularly how the) 7 have striven to smooth over the difficulty of 
 their tallying with those of Akilas — as far as either had come 
 under their notice — for this and other minor points we must 
 refer the reader to Eichhorn, Jahn, Berthold, Havernick, &c. 
 
 We now turn to the Targum itself. 
 
 Its language is Chaldee, closely approaching in purity 
 of idiom to that of Ezra and Daniel. It follows a sober and 
 clear, though not a slavish exegesis, and keeps as closely and 
 minutely to the text as is at all consistent with its purpose, 
 viz., to be chiefly, and above all, a version for the people. 
 Its explanations of difficult and obscure passages bear ample 
 witness to the competence of those who gave it its final 
 shape, and infused into it a rare unity. Even where foreign 
 matter is introduced, or, as Berkowitz in his Hebrew work 
 Oteh Or keenly observes, where it most artistically blends 
 two translations, one literal, and one figurative, into one ; it 
 steadily keeps in view the real sense of the passage in hand. 
 It is always concise and clear, and dignified, worthy of the 
 grandeur of its subject. It avoids the legendary character 
 with which all the later Targums entwine the Biblical word, 
 as far as ever circumstances would allow. Only in the 
 poetical passages it was compelled to yield — though reluc- 
 tantly — to the popular craving for Haggadah ; but even here 
 it chooses and selects with rare taste and tact. 
 
 Generally and broadly it may be stated that alterations 
 are never attempted, save for the sake of clearness ; tropical 
 terms are dissolved by judicious circumlocutions, for the 
 correctness of which the authors and editors — in possession 
 of the living tradition of a language still written, if not 
 spoken in their day — certainly seem better judges than some 
 modern critics, who through their own incomplete acquaint- 
 ance with the idiom, injudiciously blame Onkelos. Highly 
 characteristic is the aversion of the Targum to anthropo- 
 pathies and anthropomorphisms ; in fact, to any term which 
 could in the eyes of the multitude lower the idea of the
 
 316 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 Highest Being. Yet there are many passages retained in 
 which human affections and qualities are attributed to Him. 
 He speaks, He sees, He hears, He smells the odour of sacri- 
 fice, is angry, repents, &c. — the Targum thus showing itself 
 entirely opposed to the allegorising and symbolising ten- 
 dencies, which in those, and still more in later days, were 
 prone to transform Biblical history itself into the most 
 extraordinary legends and fairy tales with or without a 
 moral. The Targum, however, while retaining terms like 
 the arm of God, the right hand of God, the finger of God — 
 for Power, Providence, <$tc. — replaces terms like foot, front, 
 back of God, by the fitting figurative meaning. We must 
 notice further its repugnance to bring the Divine Being into 
 too close contact, as it were, with man. It erects a kind of 
 reverential barrier, a sort of invisible medium of awful reve- 
 rence between the Creator and the creature. Thus terms 
 like "the Word" (Logos = Sansc. Om), "the Shechinah" 
 (Holy presence of God's Majesty, "the Glory"), further, 
 human beings talking not to, but " before " God, are frequent. 
 The same care, in a minor degree, is taken of the dignity of 
 the persons of the patriarchs, who, though the Scripture may 
 expose their weaknesses, were not to be held up in their 
 iniquities before the multitude whose ancestors and ideals 
 they were. That the most curious varepa -rrporepa and 
 anachronisms occur, such as Jacob studying the Torah in the 
 academy of Shem, &c, is due to the then current typifying 
 tendencies of the Haggadah. Some extremely cautions, 
 withal poetical, alterations also occur when the patriarchs 
 speak of having acquired something by violent means : as 
 Jacob (Gen. xlviii. 22), by his " sword and bow," which two 
 words become in the Targum, " prayers and supplications." 
 But the points which will have to be considered chiefly when 
 the Targum becomes a serious study — as throwing the 
 clearest light upon its time, and the ideas then in vogue 
 about matters connected with religious belief and exercises — 
 are those which treat of prayer, study of the law, prophecy, 
 angelology, and the Messiah. 
 
 The only competent investigator w T ho, after Winer (De 

 
 ON THE TARGUMS. o4/ 
 
 Onkeloso, 1820), but with infinitely more minuteness and 
 thorough knowledge of the subject, has gone fully into this 
 matter, is Luzzatto. Considering the vast importance of 
 this, the oldest Targum, for biblical as well as for linguistic 
 studies in general — not to mention the advantages that 
 might accrue from it to other branches of learning, such 
 as geography, history, &c. : we think it advisable to give — 
 for the first time — a brief sketch of the results of this 
 eminent scholar. His classical, though not rigorously metho- 
 dical, Oheh Ger (J 830) is, it is true, quoted by every one, but 
 in reality known to but an infinitely small number, although 
 it is written in the most lucid modern Hebrew. 
 
 He divides the discrepancies between Text and Targum 
 into four principal classes. 
 
 (A.) Where the language of the Text has been changed 
 in the Targum, but the meaning of the former retained. 
 
 (B.) Where both language and meaning were changed. 
 
 (C.) Where the meaning was retained, but additions were 
 introduced. 
 
 (D.) Where the meaning was changed, and additions were 
 introduced. 
 
 He further subdivides these four into thirty-two classes, 
 to all of which he adds, in a most thorough and accurate 
 manner, some telling specimens. Notwithstanding the appa- 
 rent pedantry of his method, and the undeniable identity 
 which necessarily must exist between some of his classes, 
 a glance over their whole body, aided by one or two ex- 
 amples in each case, will enable us to gain as clear an 
 insight into the manner and " genius " of the Onkelos- 
 Targum as is possible without the study of the work itself. 
 
 (A.) Discrepancies where the language of the text has 
 been changed in the Targum, but the meaning of the former 
 has been retained. 
 
 1. Alterations owing to the idiom : e.g. the singular, 1 
 "Let there be [sit] lights" (Gen. i. 14), is transformed into 
 the plur. 2 [sint] in the Targum, " man and woman," 3 as 
 
 1 w - prv •' in."xi trw
 
 348 
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 
 applied to the animals (Gen. vii. 2), becomes, as unsuitable 
 in the Aramaic, "male and female." 1 
 
 2. Alterations out of reverence towards God, more espe- 
 cially for the purpose of doing away with all ideas of a 
 plurality of the Godhead : e. g. the terms Adonai, Elohim, 
 are replaced by Jehovah, lest these might appear to imply 
 more than one God. Where Elohim is applied to idolatry 
 it is rendered " Error." 2 
 
 3. Anthropomorphisms, where they could be misunder- 
 stood and construed into a disparagement or a lowering of 
 the dignity of the Godhead among the common people, are 
 expunged : e. g. for "And God smelled a sweet smell" (Gen. 
 viii. 21), Onkelos has "And Jehovah received the sacrifice 
 with grace ; " for (i And Jehovah went 3 down to see ! the 
 city " (Gen. xi. 5), " And Jehovah revealed 4 Himself," a 
 term of frequent use in the Targum for verbs of motion, such 
 as "to go down," " to go through," &c, applied to God. " I 
 shall pass over 5 you" (Ex. xii. 13), the Targum renders '• I 
 shall protect you." 6 Yet only anthropomorphisms which 
 clearly stand figuratively and might give offence, are ex- 
 punged, not as Maimonides, followed by nearly all com- 
 mentators, holds, all anthropomorphisms, for words like 
 " hand, finger, to speak, see," &c. (see above), are retained. 
 But where the words remember, think of, 7 &c, are used of 
 God, they always, whatever their tense in the text, stand in 
 the Targum in the present ; since a past or future would 
 imply a temporary forgetting on the part of the Omniscient. 8 
 A keen distinction is here also established by Luzzatto be- 
 tween itn and 'hz, the former used of a real external seeing, 
 the latter of a seeing " into the heart." 
 
 4. Expressions used of and to God by men are brought 
 more into harmony with the idea of His dignity. Thus 
 Abraham's question, " The Judge of the whole earth, should 
 he not (N 1 ?) do justice ? " (Gen. xviii. 25) is altered into the 
 
 1 K3PW -131 
 
 
 8 Comp. Prayer for Rosh hashaua, 
 
 - N»»ey miina 
 
 3 TW 
 
 "m nrDty ;\\*1, '-And there is no 
 
 4 "him) 
 
 5 TinDD 
 
 forgetting before the throne of Thy 
 
 6 Dins 
 
 7 -cr nps 
 
 glory."
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 349 
 
 affirmative : " The Judge .... verily He will do justice." 
 Laban, who speaks of his gods * in the text, is made to speak 
 of his religion 2 only in the Targuin. 
 
 5. Alterations in honour of Israel and their ancestors. 
 Rachel "stole" 3 the Teraphim (xxxi. 19) is softened into 
 Rachel "took;" 4 Jacob "fled" 5 from Laban (ib. 22), into 
 " went ; " 6 " The sons of Jacob answered Shecheni with 
 craftiness " "' (xxxiv. 13), into " with wisdom." 8 
 
 6. Short glosses introduced for the better understanding 
 of the text ; " for it is my mouth that speaks to you " (xlv. 
 12), Joseph said to his brethren : Targum, " in your tongue," 9 
 i.e. without an interpreter. " The people who had made 
 the calf;" (Ex. xxxii. 35) Targum, "worshipped," 10 since 
 not they, but Aaron made it. 
 
 7. Explanation of tropical and allegorical expressions : 
 " Be fruitful (lit. ' creep,' from yittf) and multiply " (Gen. 
 i. 28), is altered into " bear children ; " n " thy brother Aaron 
 shall be thy prophet " 12 (Ex. vii. 1), into "thy interpreter" 13 
 (Meturgeman) ; " I made thee a god (Elohim) to Pharaoh '* 
 (Ex. vii. 1), into " a master ; " u " to a head and not to a tail " 
 (Deut. xxviii. 13), into " to a strong man and not to a weak ;" 15 
 and finally, " Whoever says of his father and his mother, I 
 saw them not " (Deut. xxxiii. 9), into " Whoever is not 
 merciful 16 towar.ls his father and his mother." 
 
 8. Tending to ennoble the language : the " washing " of 
 Aaron and his sons is altered into " sanctifying ; " 17 the 
 "carcasses" 18 of the animals of Abraham (Gen. xv. 11) 
 become " pieces ; " 19 " anointing " 20 becomes " elevating, rais- 
 ing ; " 21 " the'wife of the bosom," 22 " wife of the covenant." 23 
 
 9. The last of the classes where the terms are altered, but 
 the sense is retained, is that in which a change of language 
 takes place in order to introduce the explanations of the oral 
 
 1 wrba - *rbm ,3 nana-nnc 14 m 
 
 3 niaani 4 m<Dai I3 vhrh vb) tpprb 16 D>m 
 
 5 mn 6 ^tk 
 
 7 ncnca * Koairn 
 
 9 pawsfea ,0 naprwin 
 
 11 i-i^tin 12 is^a 
 
 17 {lcnpn 18 Dnaa 
 
 19 n^q (onnn) 20 n^o 
 
 21 *mn 22 yp>n ne»K 
 23 "p^p nB>'«
 
 350 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 law and the traditions : e.g. Lev. xxiii. 11, " On the morrow 
 after the Sabbath l {i.e. the feast of the unleavened bread) 
 the priest shall wave it (the sheaf)," Onkelos for Sabbath, 
 feast-day. 2 For frontlets 3 (Deut. vi. 8), Tefillin (phylac- 
 teries). 4 
 
 (B.) Change of both the terms and the meaning. 
 
 10. To avoid phrases apparently derogatory to the dignity 
 of the Divine Being : " Am I in God's stead ? " 5 becomes in 
 Onkelos, " Dost thou ask [children] from me ? 6 from before 
 God thou shouldst ask them " (Gen. xxx. 2). 
 
 11. In order to avoid anthropomorphisms of an objection- 
 able kind. "With the breath of Thy nose" 7 ("blast of 
 Thy nostrils," A. V., Ex. xv. 8), becomes " With the word of 
 Thy mouth." 8 " And I shall spread my hand over thee " 9 
 (Ex. xxxiii. 22), is transformed into " I shall with my word 
 protect thee." 10 " And thou shalt see my back parts, 11 bnt 
 ray face 12 shall not be seen " (Ex. xxxiii. 23) : " And thou 
 shalt see what is behind me, 13 but that which is before me u 
 shall not be seen " (Deut. xxxiii. 12). 
 
 12. For the sake of religious euphemisms : e.g. " And ye 
 shall be like God " 15 (Gen. iii. 5), is altered into " like 
 princes." 16 " A laughter " has God made me " (Gen. xxi. 6), 
 into " A joy 18 He gives me " — " God " being entirely omitted. 
 
 13. In honour of the nation and its ancestors : e.g. " Jacob 
 was an upright man, a dweller in tents" 19 (Gen. xxv. 27), 
 becomes " an upright man, frequenting the house of learn- 
 ing." 20 " One of the people 21 might have lain with thy wife" 
 (Gen. xxvi. 10) — " One singled out among the people," 22 i. e. 
 the king. " Thy brother came and took my blessing with 
 deceit " 23 (Gen. xxvii. 35), becomes " with Avisdom." 24 
 
 14. In order to avoid similes objectionable on oesthetical 
 
 I rat? 
 
 - K3B KW 3 rnBDID 
 
 4 j^^n 5 »33K b& nnnn 
 
 6 131 N-yn ns "3on 
 
 : -psa mini 8 "pis -lo^oni 
 
 9 »B3 '•natri 10 nooa pni :3 nonon - 1 KDSina 
 
 II "linN 12 *0B 
 
 13 nnan n" 1 » nnpn n* 
 15 Qirftx 18 paiai 17 pinv 
 18 Nnnn 19 D^n« acn< 
 
 20 6UE&1K JV33 B>DB>» 
 
 - 1 oyn nnx * soya nmon nn
 
 ON THE TAEGTJMS. 
 
 351 
 
 grounds- " And he will bathe his foot in oil " x — " And he 
 will have many delicacies 2 of a king " (Deut. xxxiii. 24). 
 
 15. In order to ennoble the language. "And man be»- 
 came a living being " 3 (G-en. ii. 7) — " And it became in man 
 a speaking spirit." 4 " How good are thy tents, 5 Jacob 
 — " How good are thy lands, 6 Jacob " (Num. xxiv. 5). 
 
 16. In favour of the Oral Law and the Rabbinical expla- 
 nations. " And go into the land of Moriah " 7 (Gen. xxii. 2), 
 becomes " into the land of worship " (the future place of the 
 Temple). " Isaac went to walk 8 in the field " (Gen. xxiv. 
 63), is rendered " to pray." 9 [Comp. Sam. Pent., p. 1114 b]. 
 " Thou shalt not boil a kid 10 in the milk of its mother " 
 (Ex. xxxiv. 26) — as meat and milk, 11 according to the 
 Halachah. 
 
 (C.) Alterations of words (circumlocutions, additions, &e.) 
 without change of meaning. 
 
 17. On account of the difference of idiom: e.g. "Her 
 father's brother" 12 ( = relation), (Gen. xxix. 12), is rendered 
 " The son of her father's sister." 13 " What God does 14 (future) 
 he has told Pharaoh" (Gen. xli. 28)— "What God will 
 do," 15 &c. 
 
 18. Additions for the sake of avoiding expressions appa- 
 rently derogatory to the dignity of the Divine Being, by 
 implying polytheism and the like : " Who is like unto Thee 16 
 among the gods ? " is rendered, " There is none like unto 
 Thee, 17 Thou art God " (Ex. xv. 11). " And they sacrifice to 
 demons who are no gods," 18 — " of no use " 19 (Deut. xxxii. 17). 
 
 19. In order to avoid erroneous notions implied in certain 
 verbs and epithets used of the Divine Being : e. g. " And 
 the Spirit of God 20 moved" (Gen. i. 2) — " A wind from before 
 the Lord." 21 " And Noah built God an altar " 22 (Gen. viii. 
 
 1 '{aw 2 'pi^n 3 rvn B>aa^ 
 
 4 i6hvv nn 1 ? Dixn nini 
 
 5 T^riN 6 "imx 
 
 ' nma 8 m^ 
 
 9 iOrDIS- [Abraham instituted, ac- 
 cording to the Midrash, the morning- 
 (Shaharith), Isaac the aftemoon- 
 (Minha), and Jacob the evening-prayer 
 (Maarib).] 
 
 12 ^nx I8 nns* in 
 
 14 rtKny 1S iiynb -my 
 
 16 -pm ••» 1T *p» in rvh 
 18 Tbx &6 -. . ,9 "pro }rn rvh 
 20 dti^n nn 21 h^rbx did jd nn 
 22 'rh
 
 352 
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 20) — "an altar before 1 the Lord." "And God 2 was with 
 the boy " (Gen. xxi. 20) — " And the word of God 3 was in 
 aid of the boy." " The mountain of God " (Ex. iii. 1)— 
 " The mountain upon which was revealed the glory 4 of 
 God." "The staff of God" (Ex. iv. 20)— " The staff with 
 which thou hast done the miracles before 5 God." " And I 
 shall see 6 what will be their end " — " It is open (reTealed) 
 before me," 7 &c. The Divine Being is in fact very rarely 
 spoken of without that spiritual medium mentioned before ; 
 it being considered, as it were, a want of proper reverence to 
 speak to or of Him directly. The terms "Before" (Dip) 
 " Word" (A0709 »-i!^o) "Glory" (tf-|p>) "Majesty" (rP/ttDttf), 
 are also constantly used instead of the Divine name : e. g. 
 " The voice of the Lord God was heard " (Gen. iii. 8)— " The 
 voice of the Word." " And He will dwell in the tents of 
 Shem " (ix. 27) — " And the Shechina [Divine Presence] will 
 dwell." "And the Lord went up from Abraham" (Geo. 
 xvii. 22) — " And the glory of God went up." " And God 
 came to Abiinelech " (Gen. xx. 3) — " And the word from 
 [before] God came to Abiinelech." 
 
 20. For the sake of improving seemingly irreverential 
 phrases in Scripture. "Who is God that I should listen 
 unto His voice ? " (Ex. v. 2) — " The name of God has not 
 been revealed to me, that I should receive His word." s 
 
 21. In honour of the nation and its ancestors. "And 
 Israel said to Joseph, Now I shall gladly die " 9 (Gen. xlvi. 
 30), which might appear frivolous in the mouth of the patri- 
 arch, becomes " I shall be comforted 10 now." " And he led 
 his flock towards n the desert " (Ex. iii. 1)—" towards a good 
 spot of pasture 12 in the desert." 
 
 22. In honour of the Law and the explanation of its obscu- 
 rities. " To days and years " (Gen. i. 14) — " that days and 
 years should be counted by them." 13 " A tree of knowledge 
 
 'n mp 
 
 '?x 
 
 3 'm jod»o 
 
 5 'n mp p 
 7 »oip "b: 
 
 s m»»D3 bipm ib 'him ab 
 fl nrncx 10 rmraN 
 11 'on -ins '- '2 rrjn -isp 
 13 Jim ■3on t ? 

 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 353 
 
 of good and evil " — " A tree, and those who eat its fruits 1 
 will distinguish between good and evil." " I shall not further 
 curse for the sake of 2 man " (viii. 21) — ''through the sin 3 of 
 man." " To the ground shall not be forgiven the blood 4 
 shed upon it " (Num. xxv. 33)—" the innocent 5 blood." 
 
 23. For the sake of avoiding similes, metonymical and 
 allegorical passages, too difficult for the comprehension of 
 the multitude: e.g. "Thy seed like the dust of the earth" 
 (Gen. xiii. 16)—" mighty 6 as the dust of the earth." " I am 
 too small for all the benefits " (Gen. xxxii. 10) — " My good 
 deeds 7 are small." " And the Lord thy God will circumcise 
 thy heart "— " the folly of thy heart." 8 " 
 
 24. For the sake of elucidating apparent obscurities, &c, 
 in the written Law. " Therefore shall a man leave his father 
 and his mother " (Gen. ii. 24) — " the home " 9 (not really his 
 parents). " The will of Him who dwelleth in the bush " — 
 u of Him that dwelleth in heaven 10 [whose Shechinah is in 
 heaven], and who revealed Himself in the bush to Moses." 
 
 25. In favour of the Oral Law and the traditional expla- 
 nations generally. " He punishes the sins of the parents on 
 their children " (Ex. xx. 5), has the addition, " when the 
 children follow the sins of their parents " (comp. Ez. xviii. 
 19). "The righteous and the just ye shall not kill " (Ex. 
 xxiii. 7) — " He who has left the tribunal as innocent, thou 
 shalt not kill him," i.e., according to the Halacha, he is not 
 to be arraigned again for the same crime. " Doorposts " 
 (mesusoth) (Deut. vi. 9)—" And thou shalt write them .... 
 and affix them upon the posts," &c. 
 
 (D.) Alteration of language and meaning. 
 
 26. In honour of the Divine Being, to avoid apparent 
 multiplicity or a likeness. " Behold man will be like one of 
 us, knowing good and evil " (Gen. iii. 22) — " He will be the 
 only one in the world 11 to know good and evil." "For who 
 
 »nn*fi p^DKi \fy» " "win 7 tiust itv? 8 *\2h nitrats 
 
 3 > 
 
 nin b^2 4 n"6 
 
 5 >pa Qib 6 jwjd " «oi?jn &rvn 
 
 pran^o rrn 
 KW3 rvrman 
 
 2 A
 
 354 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 is a God in heaven and on earth who could do like Thy deeds 
 and powers ? " (Dent. iii. 24)—" Thou art God, Thy Divine 
 Presence (Shechinah) is in heaven 1 above, and reigns on 
 earth below, and there is none who does like unto Thy 
 deeds," &c. 
 
 27. Alteration of epithets employed of God. " And before 
 Thee shall I hide myself" 2 (Gen. iv. 14)—" And before Thee 
 it is not possible to hide." 3 " This is my God and I will 
 praise 4 Him, the God of my father and I will extol 5 Him " 
 (Ex. xv. 2) — " This is my God, and I will build him a sanc- 
 tuary ; 6 the God of my fathers, and I will pray before 
 Him." 7 " In one moment I shall go up in thy midst and 
 annihilate thee" — "For one hour will I take away my 
 majesty 8 from among thee " (since no evil can come from 
 above). 
 
 28. For the ennobling of the sense. " Great is Jehovah 
 above all gods " — " Great is God, and there is no other god 
 beside Him.'' " Send through him whom thou wilt send " 
 (Ex. iv. 13) — " through him who is worthy to be sent." 
 
 29. In honour of the nation and its ancestors. " And the 
 souls they made 9 in Haran " (Gen. xii. 5) — " the souls they 
 made subject to the Divine Law 10 in Haran." " And Isaac 
 brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah " (Gen. xxiv. 
 67) — " And lo righteous were her works, 11 like the works of 
 his mother Sarah." " And he bent his shoulder to bear, and 
 he became a tributary servant " (Gen. xlix. 15) — " And he 
 will conquer the cities of the nations and destroy their dwell- 
 ing-places, and those that will remain there will serve him 
 and pay tribute to him." " People, foolish and not wise" 
 (Deut. xxxii. 6) — "People who has received the Law and 
 has not become wise." 12 
 
 30. Explanatory of tropical and metonymical phrases. 
 " And besides thee no man shall raise his hand and his foot 
 in the whole land of Egypt " (Gen. xli. 44)—" There shall 
 
 3 k-iddk 1 ? tb'Sn n^ 4 mux , 9 iL"y >» Kivnii6 lTayen 
 
 5 truDoriN ll Kmsw ppm 
 
 6 tripD^rv 1 ? »an« 1J wan *6i njvtix i^ap
 
 OX THE TARGUMS. 355 
 
 not a man raise his hand to seize a weapon, and his foot to 
 ride on a horse." 
 
 31. To ennoble or improve the language. " Coats of 
 skin" (Gen. iii. 21) — "Garments of honour 1 on the skin of 
 their flesh." " Thy two daughters who are found with thee " 
 (Gen. xix. 15)—" who were found faithful with thee." " May 
 Reuben live and not die " (Deut. xxxiii. 6) — " May Reuben 
 live in the everlasting life." 
 
 The foregoing examples will, we trust, be found to bear 
 out sufficiently the judgment given above on this Targum. 
 In spite of its many and important discrepancies, it never 
 for one moment forgets its aim of being a clear, though free, 
 translation for the people, and nothing more. Wherever it 
 deviates from the literalness of the text, such a course, in its 
 case, is fully justified — nay, necessitated — either by the 
 obscurity of the passage, or the wrong construction that 
 naturally would be put upon its wording by the multitude. 
 The explanations given agree either with the real sense, or 
 develop the current tradition supposed to underlie it. The 
 specimens adduced by other investigators, however differently 
 classified or explained, are easily brought under the fore- 
 going heads. They one and all tend to prove that Onkelos, 
 whatever the objections against single instances, is one of 
 the most excellent and thoroughly competent interpreters. A 
 few instances only- — and they are very few indeed — may be 
 adduced, where even Onkelos, as it would appear, " dormitat." 
 Far be it from us for one moment to depreciate, as has been 
 done, the infinitely superior knowledge both of the Hebrew 
 and Chaldee idioms on the part of the writers and editors of 
 our document, or to attribute their discrepancies from modem 
 translations to ignorance. They drank from the fullness of 
 a highly valuable traditional exegesis, as fresh and vigorous 
 in their days as the Hebrew language itself still was in the 
 circles of the wise, the academies and schools. But we have 
 this advantage, that words which then were obsolete, and 
 whose meaning was known no longer — only guessed at — are 
 
 1 1DH pnab 
 
 2 a 2
 
 356 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 to us familiar by the numerous progeny they have produced 
 in cognate idioms, known to us through the mighty spread 
 of linguistic science in our days; and if we are not aided by 
 a traditional exegesis handed down within and without the 
 schools, perhaps ever since the days of the framing of the 
 document itself, neither are we prejudiced and fettered by it. 
 Whatever may be implied and hidden in a verse or word, we 
 have no reason to translate it accordingly, and,for the attain- 
 ing of this purpose, to overstrain the powers of the roots. 
 Among such small shortcomings of our translator may be 
 mentioned that he appears to have erroneously derived fiNttf 
 (Gen. iv. 7) from NttfJ ; that jirD'O ( xx - 6) is by him 
 rendered JirDlNj 1128 (Gen. xli. 43) by 82bzb 828, 
 128 (Deut. xxiv. 5) 128 ; and the like. Comp. however 
 the Commentators on these passages. 
 
 The bulk of the passages generally adduced as proofs of 
 want of knowledge on the part of Oukelos have to a great 
 part been shown in the course of the foregoing specimens 
 to be intentional deviations ; many other passages not men- 
 tioned merely instance the want of knowledge on the part 
 of his critics. 
 
 Some places, again, exhibit that blending of two distinct 
 translations, of which we have spoken : the catchword being 
 apparently taken in two different senses. Thus Gen. xxii.* 
 13, where he translates : " And Abraham lifted up his eyes 
 after these, and behold there was a ram ; " he has not " in his 
 perplexity " mistranslated ~TT\8 for 118, but he has only 
 placed for the sake of clearness the ")r\8 after the verb (he 
 saw), instead of the noun (ram) ; and the 811, which is 
 moreover wanting in some texts, has been added, not as a 
 translation of inK or 118, but in order to make the passage 
 more lucid still. A similar instance of a double translation 
 is found in Gen. ix. 6 : " Whosoever sheds a man's blood, by 
 man shall his blood be shed " — rendered " Whosoever sheds 
 the blood of man, by witnesses through the sentence of the 
 judges shall his blood be shed ;" U182, by man, being taken 
 first as " witness," and then as "judges." 
 
 We may further notice the occurrence of two Messianic 

 
 ON THE TARGUMS. oDi 
 
 passages in this Targum : the one, Gen. xlix. 10, Shiloh ; the 
 other, Num. xxiv. 17, "sceptre:" both rendered "Messiah." 
 
 A fuller idea of the "Genius" of Onkelos as Translator 
 and as Paraphrast, may be arrived at from the specimens 
 subjoined in pp. 387-392. 
 
 We cannot here enter into anything like a minute account 
 of the dialect of Onkelos or of any other Targum. Regard- 
 ing the linguistic shades of the different Targums, we must 
 confine ourselves to the general remark, that the later the 
 version, the more corrupt and adulterated its language. 
 Three dialects, however, are chiefly to be distinguished : as 
 in the Aramaic idiom in general, which in contradistinction 
 to the Syriac, or Christian Aramaic, may be called Judseo- 
 Aramaic, so also in the different Targums ; and their recog- 
 nition is a material aid towards fixing the place of their 
 origin ; although we must warn the reader that this guidance 
 is not always to be relied upon. 
 
 1. The Galilean Dialect, known and spoken of already in 
 the Talmud as the one which most carelessly confounds its 
 sounds, vowels as well as consonants. "The Galileans are 
 negligent with respect to their language, 1 and care not for 
 grammatical forms" 2 is a common saying in the Gemara. 
 "We learn that they did not distinguish properly between B 
 and P (l, 3), saying Tapula instead of Tabula, between 
 Ch and K (D and p) saying ^etpto? for Kvpcos. Far less 
 could they distinguish between the various gutturals, as is 
 cleverly exemplified in the story where a Judaean asked a 
 Galilean, when the latter wanted to buy an ien, whether he 
 meant 1D^ (wool), or IBN (a lamb), or I^H (wine), or "ibn 
 (an ass). The next consequence of this their disregard of 
 the gutturals was, that they threw them often off entirely at 
 the beginning of a word per aphteresin. Again they con- 
 tracted, or rather wedged together, words of the most 
 dissimilar terminations and beginnings. By confounding 
 the vowels like the consonants, they often created entirely 
 new words and forms. The Mappik H (n) became Ch 
 
 1 iTBpn N"? - \tovh np»h vb
 
 358 ON THE TARGTJMS. 
 
 (somewhat similar to the Scotch pronunciation of the initial 
 H). As the chief reason for this Galilean confusion of 
 tongues (for which comp. Matt, xxvi. 73; Mark xiv. 70) 
 may be assigned the increased facility of intercourse with 
 the neighbouring nations owing to their northern situation. 
 
 2. The Samaritan Dialect, a mixture of vulgar Hebrew 
 and Aramean, in accordance with the origin of the people 
 itself. Its chief characteristics are the frequent use of the 
 Ain (which not only stands for other gutturals, but is even 
 used as mater lectionis), the commutation of the gutturals in 
 general, and the indiscriminate use of the mute consonants 
 n for % p for 3, n for p, &c. 
 
 3. The Juda?an or Jerusalem Dialect (comp. Ned. 6Q b) 
 scarcely ever pronounces the gutturals at the end properly, 
 often throws them off entirely. Jeshua becomes Jeshu; 
 Sheba — Shib. Many words are peculiar to this dialect alone. 
 The appellations of "door," 1 "light," 2 "reward," 3 &c, are 
 totally different from those used in the other dialects. Alto- 
 gether all the peculiarities of provincialism, shortening and 
 lengthening of vowels, idiomatic phrases and words, also an 
 orthography of its own. generally with a fuller and broader 
 vocalisation, are noticeable throughout both the Targums 
 and the Talmud of Jerusalem, which, for the further elucida- 
 tion of this point as of many others have as yet not found an 
 investigator. 
 
 The following recognised Greek words, the greater part of 
 which also occur in the Talmud and Midrash, are found in 
 Onkelos : Ex. xxviii. 25, 4 /3>]pvWo<> ; Ex. xxviii. 11, 5 y\uc/»; ; 
 Gen. xxviii. 17, 6 lSmottjs ; Lev. xi. 30, 7 kcoXcotj^ ; Ex. xxviii. 
 
 19, 8 6paiaa<; (Plin. xxxvii. 68) ; Ex. xxxix. 11, 9 Kapxv 
 hovLoi, comp. Pes. der. Kah. xxxii. (Carbunculi) ; Deut. xx. 
 
 20, w x a P ( ' lK0) f xa ( Ber * ^" xcvin 5 Ex. xxviii. 20, n %/owyaa ; 
 Num. xv. 38, Deut. xxii. 12, 12 Kpdcnrehov; Ex. xxx. 34, 
 
 1 NBH for N33 
 
 2 wna for »a-iE> 
 
 9 NJH3"0 10 D13"0 
 
 3 -IBID for 1iS 
 
 *&6"ia 
 
 11 (ND S ) Ql-O (Mich. Lex. Syr. 435, 
 
 '■fo, 
 
 ° tamn 
 
 makes it. Pi rsian.') 
 
 7 an'cbn 
 
 s N"p-o 
 
 12 tfiDDn:)
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 359 
 
 1 /a'<7T05 ; Gen. xxxvii. 28, ^XrjSov; Ex. xxiv. 16, 3 (pcipaos; 
 Ex. xxvi. 6, 4 Tropirri ; Gen. vi. 14, 5 Ke8pos; Ex. xxviii. 19, 
 6 /ceyxpos (Plin. xxxvii. 4). To these may be added the un- 
 recognised 7 /cepafifc (Ex. xxi. 18), 8 Tu/fyou^s' or Xefipoxv 
 (Gen. xxx. 14), &c. 
 
 The following short rules on the general mode of tran- 
 scribing the Greek letters in Aramaic and Syriao (Targum, 
 Talmud, Midrash, &c), may not be out of place : — 
 
 r before palatals, pronounced like v, becomes j. 
 
 Z is rendered by j. 
 
 H appears to have occasionally assumed the pronunciation 
 of a consonant (Digamma) ; and a l is inserted. 
 
 © is Ji, T fa. But this rule, even making allowances for 
 corruptions, does uot always seem to have been strictly 
 observed. 
 
 K is p, sometimes J. 
 
 M, which before labials stands in lieu of a v, becomes j : 
 occasionally a j is inserted before labials where it is not 
 found in the Greek word. 
 
 H, generally DD» sometimes, however, ^ or jjj. 
 
 II is 3, sometimes, however, it is softened into 1. 
 
 P is sometimes altered into ^ or J. 
 
 f P becomes either m or "in at the beginning of a word. 
 
 % either D or |. 
 
 The sjnritus asper, which in Greek is dropped in the 
 middle of a word, reappears again sometimes (<rvvi8poi — 
 SanAedrin). Even the lenis is represented sometimes by a n 
 at the beginning of a word ; sometimes, however, even the 
 asjper is dropped. 
 
 As to the vowels no distinct rule is to be laid down, owing 
 principally to the original want of vowel-points in our texts. 
 
 Before double consonants at the beginning of a word an tf 
 prostheticum is placed, so as to render the pronunciation 
 easier. The terminations are frequently Hebraised : — thus 
 
 nt?3 - liyJ? I 5 omp 6 n:j;p
 
 360 ON THE TAHGTTMS. 
 
 ol is sometimes rendered by the termination of the Masc. V\. 
 D\ cvc. 
 
 A curious and instructive comparison may be instituted, 
 between this mode of transcription of the Greek letters into 
 Hebrew, and that of the Hebrew letters into Greek, as found 
 chiefly in the LXX. 
 
 N sometimes inaudible {spirit. Jen.) ' 'Aapcov, 'EX/cam ; some- 
 times audible (as spirit, asper), 'Afipadp,, ' HXias. 
 
 2 = /3: 'Vefieiaca ; sometimes <p : 'Ia/ce/3 £>/</>, sometimes v. 
 'Vaav, sometimes fi/3 : Zepovp,{3a(3e\, sometimes it is com- 
 pletely changed into p,: 'Iap,pe2a (2 Ohr. xxvi. G). 
 
 J = 7 : Tofxep, sometimes k : Aco/]k, sometimes ^ : Xepovx- 
 
 1 = 8 : once = t Marpaffl (Gen. xxxvi. 39). 
 
 H = n, either spirit, asp. like 'O8oppd, or spir. len. like 
 'A/3&. 
 
 T = v , not the vowel, but our v : "Et/a, Aei>/: thus also ou 
 (as the Greek writers often express the Latin v by ov) : 
 'leaaovd : sometimes = /3 : ^Laj3v (Gen. xiv. 5) ; sometimes 
 it is entirely left out, Wart for Vashti. 
 
 t = £, sometimes cr : HafiovXwv, Xacr/3/ ; rarely £: Bau£ 
 (Gen. xxii. 21). 
 
 n, often entirely omitted, or represented by a spir. len. in 
 the beginning, or the reduplication of the vowel in the middle 
 or at the end of the word, sometimes = % : Kdp, ; sometimes 
 = k : TdfieK (Gen. xxii. 24). 
 
 a = t: Sa<f)aT; sometimes = 8: <froi>8 (Gen. x. G); or 6 : 
 'EXi</>aXaS (2 Sam. v. 16). 
 
 > = i\ 'Ia/oo/3, or I before p (-)) : 'lepepblas. Between 
 several vowels it is sometimes entirely omitted ; 'ItwaSa. 
 
 3 = x '■ Xamai/ ; sometimes k : HafiaOaicd (Gen. x. 7) ' r 
 rarely = 7 : Vacpdcopeip,. 
 
 b> 3» *1 = \ v > P \ °"t they are often found interchanged •_ 
 owing perhaps to the similarity of the Greek letters. 3 is 
 sometimes also rendered p, (see above). 
 
 q = /*, sometimes ft : ~Ne/3pco8, XefiXd (1 Chr. i. 47). 
 ty and D = °" : ~vp,ed)v, ~r)eip, Sn>. 
 
 ^ = s^"'. ten. : 'E^pcoy ; sometimes = 7 ( i ) T6p,oppa ;. 
 sometimes /c, Wpfio/c (Gen. xxiii. 2).
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 36 1 
 
 3 = <p : <&a\e n /, or it : SaXTradS. 
 
 '£ = <r: %i8a)v; sometimes £: Ov%. (Gen. x. 23; Cod. 
 Alex. "H? ; xxii. 21 : v n|.) 
 
 p = /c : BaXa/c ; sometimes % : XerToupa ; also 7 : XeAey. 
 j-| = 6 : 'lacked ; sometimes t : To^o?. 
 
 As to the Bible Text from which the Targum was pre- 
 pared, we can only reiterate that we have no certainty what- 
 ever on this head, owing to the extraordinarily corrupt state 
 of our Targum texts. Pages upon pages of Variants have 
 been gathered by Cappellus, Kennicott, Buxtorf, De Kossi, 
 Clericus, Luzzatto, and others, by a superficial comparison 
 of a few copies only, and those chiefly printed ones. When- 
 ever the very numerous MSS. shall be collated, then the 
 learned world may possibly come to certain probable con- 
 clusions on it. It would appear, however, that broadly 
 speaking, our present Masoretic text has been the one from 
 which the Onk. Version was, if not made, yet edited, at all 
 events ; unless we assume that late hands have been inten- 
 tionally busy in mutually assimilating text and translation. 
 Many of the inferences drawn by De Rossi and others from 
 the discrepancies of the version to discrepancies of the 
 original from the Masor. Text, must needs be rejected if 
 Onkelos's method and phraseology, as we have exhibited it, 
 are taken into consideration. Thus, when, Ex. xxiv. 7, 
 ''before the people" is found in Onkelos, while our Hebrew 
 text reads " in the ears," it by no means follows that Onkelos 
 read "0TN2 : it is simply his way of explaining the unusual 
 phrase, to which he remains faithful throughout. Or, " Lead 
 the people unto the place (A. V.) of which I have spoken' 1 
 (Ex. xxxii. 34), is solely Onkelos's translation of t#N bit, 
 scil. the place, and no Dpl2 need be conjectured as having 
 stood in Onkelos's copy ; as also, Ex. ix. 7, his addition " From 
 the cattle of 'the children of Israel" does not prove a ^2 
 to have stood in Ins Codex. 
 
 And this also settles (or rather leaves unsettled), the 
 question as to the authenticity of the Targumic Texts, such 
 as we have them. Considering that no M!S. has as yet been
 
 302 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 found older than at most GOO years, even the careful com- 
 parison of all those that do exist would not much further 
 our knowledge. As far as those existing are concerned, they 
 teem with the most palpable blunders, — not to speak of 
 variants, owing to sheer carelessness on the part of the 
 copyists ; — but few are of a nature damaging the sense 
 materially. The circumstance that Text and Targuni were 
 often placed side by side, column by column, must have had 
 no little share in the incorrectness, since it was but natural 
 to make the Targuni resemble the Text as closely as possible, 
 while the nature of its material differences was often unknown 
 to the scribe. In fact, the accent itself was made to fit both 
 the Hebrew and the Chaldee wherever a larger addition did 
 not render it utterly impossible. Thus letters are inserted, 
 omitted, thrust in, blotted out, erased, in an infinite number 
 of places. But the difference goes still further. In some 
 Codices synonymous terms are used most arbitrarily as it 
 would appear : rr^HN and NJ1D1N earth, DIN and Nit'JN man, 
 mil* and "\bnt2 path, miT and DTl^N, Jehovah and Elohhn, 
 are found to replace each other indiscriminately. In some 
 instances, the Hebrew Codex itself has, to add to the con- 
 fusion, been emendated from the Targum. 
 
 A Masorah has been written on Onkelos, without, however, 
 any authority being inherent in it, and without, we should 
 say, much value. It has never been printed, nor, as far as 
 we have been able to ascertain, is there any MS. now to be 
 found in this country, or in any of the public libraries abroad. 
 What has become of Buxtorfs copy, which he intended to 
 add to his never printed " Babylonia " — a book devoted to 
 this same subject — we do not know. Luzzatto has lately 
 found such a " Masorah " in a Pentateuch MS., but he only 
 mentions some variants contained in it. Its title must not 
 mislead the reader ; it has nothing whatever to do with the 
 Masorah of the Bible, but is a recent work, like the Masorah 
 of the Talmud, which has nothing whatever to do with the 
 Talmud Text. 
 
 The MSS. of Onkelos are extant in great numbers — a 
 circumstance easily explained by the injunction that it should
 
 OX THE TAKGUMS. SbS 
 
 he read every Sabbath at home, if not in the Synagogue. 
 The Bodleian has 5, the British Museum 2, Vienna 6, 
 Augsburg 1, Nuremberg 2, Altdorf 1, Carlsruhe 3, Stuttgart 
 2, Erfurt 3, Dresden 1, Leipsic 1, Jena 1, Dessau 1, Helin- 
 stadt 2, Berlin 4, Breslau 1, Brieg 1, Kegensburg 1, Hamburg 
 7, Copenhagen 2, Upsala 1, Amsterdam 1, Paris 8, Molsheim 
 1, Venice 6, Turin 2, Milan 4, Leghorn 1, Sienna 1, Genoa 1, 
 Florence 5, Bologna 2, Padua 1, Trieste 2, Parma about 40. 
 Eome 18 more or less complete Codd. containing Onkelos. 
 
 Eclitio Princeps, Bologna 1482, fol. (Abr. b. Chajjim) with 
 Hebr. Text andftashi. Later Edd. Soria 1490, Lisbon 1491, 
 Constantinople 1505 : from these were taken the texts in the 
 Complutensian (1517) and the Venice (Bomberg) Polyglotts 
 (1518, 152G, 1547-49), and Bnxtorfs Babbinical Bible 
 (1619). This was followed by the Paris Polyglott (1645), 
 and Walton's (1657). A recent and much emendated edition 
 dates Wilna 1852. 
 
 Of the extraordinary similarity between Onkelos and the 
 Samaritan version we have spoken under Samaritan Pen- 
 tateuch [p. 429]. There also will be found a specimen of 
 both, taken from the Barberini Codex. Many more points 
 connected with Onkelos and his influence upon later Herine- 
 neutics and Exegesis, as well as his relation to earlier or 
 later versions, we have no space to enlarge upon, desirable 
 as an investigation of these points might be. We have, 
 indeed, only been induced to dwell so long upon this single 
 Targurn, because in the first instance a great deal that has 
 been said here will, mutatis mutandis, hokl good also for the 
 other Targums; and further, because Onkelos is the 
 Chaldee version tear e%ox>]v, while, from Jonathan down- 
 wards, we more and more leave the province of Version and 
 gradually arrive from Paraphrase to Midrash-Haggadah. 
 We shall therefore not enter at any length into these, but 
 confine ourselves chiefly to main results.
 
 364 ON THE TAKGUMS, 
 
 II. Targum on the PjioniETS. 
 
 viz. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
 Ezekiel, and the twelve Minor Prophets, — called Takgum of 
 Jonathan ben Uzziel. 
 
 Next in time and importance to Onkelos on the Pentateuch 
 stands the Targum on the Prophets, which in our printed 
 Edd. and MSS. — none older, we repeat it, than about 600 
 years — is ascribed to Jonathan ben Uzziel, of whom the 
 Talmud contains the following statements: — (1.) "Eighty 
 disciples had Hillel the Elder, thirty of whom were Avorthy 
 that the Shechinah (Divine Majesty) should rest upon them, 
 as it did upon Moses our Lord ; peace be upon him. Thirty 
 of them were worthy that the sun should stand still at their 
 bidding as it did at that of Joshua ben Nun. Twenty were 
 of intermediate worth. The greatest of them all was Jonathan 
 b. Uzziel, the least 11. Johanan b. Saccai ; and it was said of 
 R. Johanan b. Saccai, that he left not (uninvestigated) the 
 Bible, the Mishnah, the Gemara, the Halachahs, the Hag- 
 gadahs, the subtleties of the Law, and the subtleties of the 
 Soferim . . . . ; the easy things and the difficult things 
 [from the most awful Divine mysteries to the common 
 popular proverbs] ... If this is said of the least of them, 
 what is to be said of the greatest, i.e. Jonathan b. Uzziel?" 
 (Bab. Bath. 134 a; comp. Succ. 2S a). (2.) A second pas- 
 sage (see Onkelos) referring more especially to our present 
 subject, reads as follows: "The Targum of Onkelos was 
 made by Onkelos the Proselyte from the mouth of R. Eliezer 
 and R. Jehoshua, and that of the Prophets by Jonathan b. 
 Uzziel from the mouth of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. 
 And in that hour was the Land of Israel shaken three hun- 
 dred parasangs. . . . And a voice was heard, saying, ' Who 
 is this who has revealed my secrets unto the sons of man ? ' 
 Up rose Jonathan ben Uzziel and said : ' It is I who have 
 revealed Thy secrets to the sons of man. . . . But it is known 
 and revealed before Thee, that not for my honour have I 
 done it, nor for the honour of my father's house, but for 
 Thine honour ; that the disputes may cease in Israel.' . . .
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 365 
 
 And he further desired to reveal the Targum to the Hagio- 
 grapha, when a voice was heard : — ' Enough.' And why ?— 
 because the day of the Messiah is revealed therein (Meg. 3a)." 
 Wonderful to relate, the sole and exclusive authority for the 
 general belief in the authorship of Jonathan b. Uzziel, is this 
 second Haggadistic passage exclusively ; which, if it does 
 mean anything, does at all events not mean our Targurn, 
 which is found mourning over the " Temple in ruins," full of 
 invectives against Home (Sam. xi. 5 ; Is. xxxiv. 9, tvc. &c), 
 mentioning Armillus (Is. x. 4) (the Antichrist), Germania 
 (Ez. xxxviii. 6) : — not to dwell upon the thousand and one 
 other internal and external evidences against a date anterior 
 to the Christian era. If interpolations must be assumed, — 
 and indeed Eashi speaks already of corruptions in his MSS. 
 — such solitary additions are at all events a very different 
 thing from a wholesale system of intentional and minute 
 interpolation throughout the bulky work. But what is still 
 more extraordinary, this belief— long and partly still upheld 
 most reverentially against all difficulties — is completely 
 modern : that is, not older than at most 600 years (the date 
 of our oldest Targum MSS.), and is utterly at variance with 
 the real and genuine sources : the Talmud, the Midrash, the 
 Babylonian Schools, and every authority down to Hai Gaon 
 (12th cent.). Frequently quoted as this Targum is in the 
 ancient works, it is never once quoted as the Targum of 
 Jonathan. But it is invariably introduced with the formula : 
 " E. Joseph a (bar Chania, the Blind, euphemistically called 
 the clear-sighted, the well-known President of Piunbaditha 
 in Babylonia, who succeeded Eabba in 319 a.d.) says," &c. 
 (Moed Katon 26 a, Pesach. 68 a, Sanh. 94 h). Twice even it 
 is quoted in Joseph's name, and with the addition, " Without 
 the Targum to this verse (due to him) we could not under- 
 stand it." This is the simple state of the case : and for more 
 than two hundred years critics have lavished all their acumen 
 to defend what never had any real existence, or at best owed 
 
 1 " Sinai," " Professor of Wheat," in allusion to his vast mastery over 
 the traditions.
 
 366 OX THE TARGUMS. 
 
 its apparent existence to a heading added by a superficial 
 scribe. 
 
 The date which the Talmud thus in reality assigns to 
 our Targum fully coincides with our former conclusions as 
 to the date of written Targums in general. And if we may 
 gather thus much from the legend that to write down the 
 Targum to the Prophets was considered a much bolder under- 
 taking — and one to which still more reluctantly leave was 
 given — than a Targum on the Pentateuch, we shall not be 
 far wrong in placing this Targum some time, although not 
 long, after Onkelos, or about the middle of the fourth cen- 
 tury ; — the latter years of E. Joseph, who, it is said, occupied 
 himself chiefly with the Targum when he had become blind. 
 The reason given for that reluctance is, although hyper- 
 bolically expressed, perfectly clear : " The Targum on the 
 Prophets revealed the secrets" — that is, it allowed free scope 
 to the wildest fantasy to run riot upon the prophetic passages 
 — tempting through their very obscurity, — and to utter 
 explanations and interpretations relative to present events, 
 and oracles of its own for future times, which might be 
 fraught with grave dangers in more than one respect. The 
 Targum on the Pentateuch (permitted to be committed to 
 writing, Meg. 3 a ; Kidd. G9 «■) could not but be, even in its 
 written form, more sober, more dignified, more within the 
 bounds of fixed and well-known traditions, than any other 
 Targum ; since it had originally been read publicly, and 
 been checked by the congregation as well as the authorities 
 present ; — as we have endeavoured to explain in the Intro- 
 duction. There is no proof, on the other hand, of more than 
 fragments from the Prophets having ever been read and 
 translated in the synagogue. Whether, however, K. Joseph 
 was more than the redactor of this the second part of the 
 Bible-Targum, which was originated in Palestine, and was 
 reduced to its final shape in Babylon, we cannot determine. 
 He may perhaps have made considerable additions of his own, 
 by filling up gaps or rejecting wrong versions of some parts. 
 So much seems certain, that the schoolmen of his Academy 
 were the collectors and revisers, and he gave it that stamp
 
 ON THE TAEGUMS. 367 
 
 of unity which it now possesses, spite of the occasional dif- 
 ference of style : — adapted simply to the variegated hues and 
 dictions of its manifold biblical originals. 
 
 But we do not mean to reject in the main either of the 
 Talmudical passages quoted. We believe that there was 
 such a man as Jonathan b. Uzziel, that he was one of the 
 foremost pupils of Hillel, and also that he did translate, 
 either privately or publicly, parts of the prophetical books ; 
 chiefly, we should say, in a mystical manner. And so 
 startling were his interpretations — borne aloft by his high 
 fame — that who but prophets themselves could have revealed 
 them to him ? And, going a step further, who could reveal 
 prophetic allegories and mysteries of all the prophetic books, 
 but those who, themselves the last in the list, had the 
 whole body of sacred oracles before them ? This appears to 
 us the only rational conclusion to be drawn from the facts : 
 — as they stand, not as they are imagined. That nothing 
 save a few snatches of this original paraphrase or Midrash 
 could be embodied in our Targum, we need not urge. Yet 
 for these even we have no proof. Zunz, the facile princeps 
 of Targumic as well as Midrashic investigation, who, as late 
 as 1830 (Gottesd. Vortr.), still believed himself in the modern 
 notion of Jonathan's authorship (" first half of first century, 
 a.d."), now utterly rejects the notion of "our possessing 
 anything of Jonathan ben Uzziel " (Geiger's Zeitsehr. 1837, 
 p. 250). 
 
 Less conservative than our view, however, are the views 
 of the modern School (Rappoport, Luzzatto, Frankel, G-eiger, 
 Levy, Bauer, Jahn, Bertholdt, Levysohn, &c), who not only 
 reject the authorship of Jonathan, but also utterly deny 
 that there was any ground whatsoever for assigning a Targum 
 to him, as is done in the Talmud. The passage, they say, 
 is not older, but younger than our Targum, and in fact does 
 apply, erroneously of course, to this, and to no other work of 
 a similar kind. The popular cry for a great " name, upon 
 which to hang" — in Talmudical phraseology — all that is 
 cherished and venerated, and the wish of those eager to 
 impart to this Version a lasting authority, found in Jonathan
 
 308 
 
 ON THE TAItGUMS. 
 
 tlie most fitting person to father it upon. Was he not the 
 greatest of the great, " who had been dusted with the dust of 
 Hillel's feet ? " He was the wisest of the wise, the one most 
 imbued with knowledge human and divine, of all those eighty, 
 the least of whom was worthy that the sun should stay its 
 course at his bidding. Nay, such were the flames 1 that 
 arose from his glowing spirit, says the hyperbolic Haggadah, 
 that " when he studied in the Law, the very birds that flew 
 over him in the air, were consumed by fire " (nisrephu 2 — not, 
 as Landau, in the preface to his Aruch, apologetically trans- 
 lates, became Seraphs). At the same time we readily grant 
 that we see no reason why the great Hillel himself, or any 
 other much earlier and equally eminent Master of the Law, 
 one of the Soferim perhaps, should not have been fixed upon. 
 Another suggestion, first broached by Drusius, and long 
 exploded, has recently been revived under a somewhat modi- 
 fied form. Jonathan (Godgiven), Drusius said, was none 
 else but Theodotion (Godgiven), the second Greek trans- 
 lator of the Bible after the LXX., who had become a Jewish 
 proselyte. Considering that the latter lived under Corn- 
 modus II., and the former at the time of Christ ; that the 
 latter is said to have translated the Prophets only (neither 
 the Pentateuch, nor the Hagiographa), while the former 
 translated the whole Bible ; that Jonathan translated into 
 Aramaic and Theodotion into Greek, — not to mention the 
 fact that Theodotion was, to say the least, a not very com- 
 petent translator, since " ignorance or negligence " (Mont- 
 faucon, Pre/, to Hexapla), or both, must needs be laid at the 
 door of a translator, who, when in difficulties, simply tran- 
 scribes the hard Hebrew words into Greek characters, with- 
 out troubling himself any further ; 3 while the mastery over 
 both the Hebrew and the Aramaic displayed in the Jona- 
 thanic Version are astounding: — considering all this, we 
 need not like Walton ask caustically, why Jonathan ben 
 
 1 The simile of the fire — " as the 4?fyy<i\, or $eyyov\, by way of emen- 
 
 Law was given in fire on Sinai" — is a 
 v. ry favourite one in the Midrash. 
 
 -' IS -C'J. 
 
 3 e. g., Lev. vii. 13, 7132, T. 
 
 dation ; Lev. xiii. (J, nnBDD, Maa<pda; 
 
 ib. JINK*, 2i')0; Lev. xviii. 23, bin, 
 OdPeA ; Is. lxiv. G, DHy, 'E55i>.
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 369 
 
 Uzziel should not rather be identified with the Emperor 
 Theodosius, whose name also is "Godgiven;" — but dismiss 
 the suggestion as Carpzov long since dismissed it. We are, 
 however, told now (Luzzatto, Geiger, &c), that as the Ba- 
 bylonian Targum on the Pentateuch was called a Targum 
 " in the manner of Aquila or Onkelos," i.e. of sterling value, 
 so also the continuation of the Babylonian Targum, which 
 embraced the Prophets, was called a Targum " in the manner 
 of Theodotion" = Jonathan ; and by a further stretch, Jona- 
 than-Theodotion became the Jonathan b. Uzziel. We cannot 
 but disagree with this hypothesis also — based on next to 
 nothing, and carried to more than the usual length of specu- 
 lation. While Akyla is quoted continually in the Talmud, 
 and is deservedly one of the best known and best beloved 
 characters, every trait and incident of whose personal history 
 is told even twice over, not the slightest trace of such a 
 person as Theodotion is to be found anywhere in the Tal- 
 mudical literature. What, again, was it that could have 
 acquired so transcendent a fame for his translation and 
 himself, that a Version put into the mouths of the very 
 prophets should be called after him, "in order that the 
 people should like it"? — a translation which was, in fact, 
 deservedly unknown, and, properly speaking, no translation 
 at all. It was, as we learn, a kind of private emendation of 
 some LXX. passages, objectionable to the pious Proselyte in 
 their then corrupted state. It was only the Book of Daniel 
 which was retained from Theodotion's pen, because in this 
 book the LXX. had become past correction. If, moreover, 
 the intention was " to give the people a Hebrew for a Greek 
 name, because the latter might sound too foreign," it was an 
 entirely gratuitous one. Greek names abound in the Talmud, 
 and even names beginning with Theo like Theodoras are to 
 be found there. 
 
 On the other hanl, the opinion has been broached that 
 this Targum was a post-Talmudical production, belonging 
 to the 7th or 8th cent. a.d. For this point we need only 
 refer to the Talmudical quotations from it. And when we 
 further add, that Jo. Morinus, a man as conspicuous by his 
 
 2 B
 
 370 ON THE TARGTJMS. 
 
 want of knowledge as by his most ludicrous attacks upon 
 all that was "Jewish" or "Protestant" (it was he, e.g. who 
 wished to see the " forged " Masoretic Code corrected from 
 the Samaritan Pentateuch, q.v.) is the chief, and almost 
 only, defender of this theory, we have said enough. On the 
 other theory of there being more than one author to our 
 Targum (Eichhorn, Bertholdt, De Wette), combated fiercely 
 by Gesenius, Havernick, and others, we need not further 
 enlarge, after what we have already said. It certainly is the 
 work, not of one, or of two, but of twenty, of fifty and more 
 Meturgemanim, Haggadists, and Halachists. The edition, 
 however, we repeat it advisedly, has the undeniable stamp 
 of one master-mind ; and its individual workings, its manner 
 and peculiarity are indelibly impressed upon the whole labour 
 from the first page to the last. Such, we hold, must be the 
 impression upon every attentive reader ; more especially, if 
 he judiciously distinguishes between the first and the last 
 prophets. That in the historical relations of the former, 
 the Version must be, on the whole, more accurate and close 
 (although here too, as we shall show, Haggadah often takes 
 the reins out of the Meturgeman's or editor's hands), while 
 in the obscurer Oracles of the latter the Midrash reigns 
 supreme : is exactly what the history of Targumic develop- 
 ment leads us to expect. 
 
 And with this we have pointed out the general character 
 of the Targum under consideration. Gradually, perceptibly 
 almost, the translation becomes the rpdyrj/jba, a frame, so to 
 speak, of allegory, parable, myth, tale, and oddly masked 
 history — such as we are wont to see in Talmud and Midrash, 
 written under the bloody censorship of Esau-Rome ; inter- 
 spersed with some lyrical pieces of rare poetical value. It 
 becomes, in short, like the Haggadah, a whole system of 
 Eastern phantasmagorias whirling round the sun of the Holy 
 Word of the Seer. Yet, it is always aware of being a trans- 
 lation. It returns to its verse after long excurses, often in 
 next to no perceptible connexion witli it. Even in the midst 
 of the full swing of fancy, swayed to and fro by the many 
 currents of thought that arise out of a single word, snatches
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 371 
 
 of the verse from which the flight was taken will suddenly 
 appear on the surface like a refrain or a keynote, showing 
 that in a reality there is a connexion, though hidden to the 
 uninitiated. For long periods again, it adheres most strictly 
 to its text and to its Terse, and translates most conscien- 
 tiously and closely. It may thus fairly be described as hold- 
 ing in point of interpretation and enlargement of the text, 
 the middle place between Onkelos, who only in extreme cases 
 deviates into paraphrase, and the subsequent Targums, whose 
 connexion with their texts is frequently of the most flighty 
 character. Sometimes indeed our Targum coincides so en- 
 tirely with Onkelos, — being, in fact, of one and the same 
 origin and growth, and a mere continuation and completion 
 as it were of the former work, that this similarity has misled 
 critics into speculations of the priority in date of either the 
 one or the other. Havernick, e.g. holds — against Zunz — that 
 Onkelos copied, plagiarised, in fact, Jonathan. We do not see, 
 quite apart from our placing Onkelos first, why either should 
 have used the other. The three passages (Judg. v. 26 and 
 Deut. xxii. 5 ; 2 K. xiv. 6 and Deut. xxiv. 16 ; Jer. xlviii. 45, 
 46 and Num. xxi. 28, 29) generally adduced, do not in the 
 first place exhibit that literal closeness which we are led to 
 expect, and which alone could be called "copying;" and in 
 the second place, the two last passages are not, as we also 
 thought we could infer from the words of the writers on 
 either side, extraneous paraphrastic additions, but simply 
 the similar translations of similar texts : while in the first 
 passage Jonathan only refers to an injunction contained in 
 the Pentateuch-verse quoted. But even had we found such 
 paraphrastic additions, apparently not belonging to the sub- 
 ject, we should have accounted for them by certain traditions 
 — the common property of the whole generation, — being re- 
 called by a certain word or phrase in the Pentateuch to the 
 memory of the one translator ; and by another word or 
 phrase in the Prophets to the memory of the other trans- 
 lator. The interpretation of Jonathau, where it adheres to 
 the text, is mostly very correct in a philosophical and ex- 
 egetical sense, closely literal even, provided the meaning of 
 
 2 b 2
 
 372 ON THE TAEGUMS. 
 
 the original is easily to be understood by the people. When, 
 however, similes are used, unfamiliar or obscure to the people, 
 it unhesitatingly dissolves them and makes them easy in 
 their mouths like household words, by adding as much of 
 explanation as seems fit; sometimes, it cannot be denied, 
 less sagaciously, even incorrectly, comprehending the original 
 meaning. Yet we must be very cautious in attributing to a 
 Version which altogether bears the stamp of thorough com- 
 petence and carefulness that which may be single corruptions 
 or interpolations, as we find them sometimes indicated by an 
 introductory " Says the Prophet " ! : although, as stated 
 above, we do not hesitate to attribute the passages displaying 
 an acquaintance with works written down to the 4th century, 
 and exhibiting popular notions current at that time, to the 
 Targum in its original state. Generally speaking, and hold- 
 ing the difference between the nature of the Pentateuch 
 (supposed to contain in its very letters and signs Halachistic 
 references, and therefore only to be handled by the Meturge- 
 man with the greatest care) and that of the Prophets (freest 
 Homiletes themselves) steadily in view — the rules laid down 
 above with respect to the discrepancies between Original 
 and Targum, in Onkelos, hold good also with Jonathan. 
 Anthropomorphisms it avoids carefully. Geographical names 
 are, in most cases, retained as in the Original, and where 
 translated, they are generally correct. Its partiality for 
 Israel never goes so far that anything derogatory to the 
 character of the people should be willingly suppressed, al- 
 though a certain reluctance against dwelling upon its ini- 
 quities and punishments longer than necessary, is visible. 
 Where, however, that which redounds to the praise of the 
 individual — more especially of heroes, kings, prophets — and 
 of the community, is contained in the text, there the para- 
 phrase lovingly tarries. Future bliss, in this world and the 
 world to come, liberation from the oppressor, restoration of 
 the Sanctuary on Mount Zion, of the Kingdom of Jehovah 
 and the House of David, the re-establishment of the nation 
 
 1 ST3J "H3K.
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. o<o 
 
 and of its full and entire independence, as well as of the 
 national worship, with all the primitive splendour of Priest 
 and Levite, singer and musician and prophet — these are the 
 favourite dreams of the people and of Jonathan, and no link 
 is overlooked by which those strains may be drawn in as 
 variations to the Biblical theme. Of Messianic passages, 
 Jonathan has pointed out those mentioned below ; 1 a number 
 not too large, if we consider how, with the increased misery 
 of the people, their ardent desire to see their Deliverer 
 appear speedily must have tried to find as many places in 
 the Bible as possible, warranting His arrival. So far from 
 their being suppressed (as, by one of those unfortunate acci- 
 dents that befall sometimes a long string of investigators, 
 who are copying their information at third and fourth hand, 
 has been unblushingly asserted by almost everybody up to 
 Gesenius, who found its source in a misunderstood sentence of 
 Carpzov), they are most prominently, often almost pointedly 
 brought forward. And there is a decided polemical animus 
 inherent in them — temperate as far as appearance goes, 
 but containing many an unspoken word : such as a fervent 
 human mind pressed down by all the woes and terrors, written 
 and unwritten, would whisper to itself in the depths of its 
 despair. These passages extol most rapturously the pomp 
 and glory of the Messiah to come — by way of contrast to 
 the humble appearance of Christ : and all the places where 
 suffering and misery appear to be the lot forecast to the 
 Anointed, it is Israel, to whom the passage is referred by 
 the Targum. 
 
 Of further dogmatical and theological peculiarities (and 
 this Targum will one day prove a mine of instruction chiefly 
 in that direction, besides the other vast advantages inherent 
 in it, as in the older Targums, for linguistic, patristic, geo- 
 graphical, historical, and other studies) we may mention 
 briefly the " Stars of God " (Is. xiv. 13 ; coinp. Dan. viii. 10, 
 
 1 1 Sam. ii. 10; 2 Sam. xxiii. 3; 1 I xxiii. 5, xxx. 21, xxxiii. 13, 15; Hoe; 
 K. iv. 33; Is. iv. 2, ix. 6, x. 27, xi. | iii. 5, xiv. 8; Mic. iv. 8, v. 2, 18; 
 1, 6, xv. 2, xvi. 1, 5, xxviii. 5, xlii. 1, I Zech. iii. 8, iv. 7, vi. 12, x. i. 
 sliii. 10, xiv. 1, Iii. 13, liii. 10 ; Jer. |
 
 374 
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 2 Mace. ix. 10, being referred — in a similar manner — to " the 
 people of Israel;") the doctrine of the second death (Isa. 
 xxii. 14, lxv. 15), &c. As to the general nature of its idiom, 
 what we have said above holds good here. Likewise our 
 remarks on the relation between the text of the Original 
 of Onkelos, and its own text, may stand for Jonathan, who 
 never appears to differ from the Masoretic text without a 
 very cogent reason. Yet, since Jonathan's MSS., though 
 very much smaller in number, are in a still worse plight 
 than those of Onkelos, we cannot speak with great certainty 
 on this point. Respecting, however, the individual language 
 and phraseology of the translation, it lacks to a certain, 
 though small, degree, the clearness and transparency of On- 
 kelos ; and is somewhat alloyed with foreign words. Not to 
 such a degree, however, that we cannot fully endorse Carpzov's 
 dictum : " Cujus nitor sermonis Chaldaei et dictionis laudator 
 puritas, ad Onkelosum proxime accedens et parum deflectens 
 a puro tersoque Chaldaismo biblico" (Crit. Saer. p. 461), and 
 incline to the belief of Wolf (Bill Eebr. ii. 1165) : " Qua> 
 vero, vel quod ad voces novas et barbaras, vel ad res aatate 
 ejus inferiores, aut futilia nonnulla, quamvis pauca triplicis 
 hujus generis exstent, ibi occurrunt, ex merito falsarii cujus- 
 dam ingenio adscribuntur." Of the manner and style of 
 tliis Targum, the few subjoined specimens will, we hope, give 
 an approximate idea. 
 
 In conclusion, we may notice a feature of our Targum, not 
 the least interesting perhaps, in relation to general or "human" 
 literature : viz., that the Shemitic fairy and legendary lore, 
 which for the last two thousand years — as far as we can 
 trace it, — has grown up in East and West to vast glittering 
 mountain-ranges, is to a very great extent to be found, in 
 an embryo state, so to say, in this our Targum. W T hen the 
 literary history of those most wonderful circles of medieval 
 sagas — the sole apparent fruit brought home by the crusaders 
 from the Eastern battle-fields — shall come to be written by 
 a competent and thorough investigator, he will have to 
 extend his study of the sources to this despised " fabulosus " 
 Targum Jonathan ben Uzziel. And the entire world of
 
 ON THE TAB.GUMS. 37o 
 
 pious biblical legend, which Islam has said and sung in the 
 Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and all its other tongues, to the 
 delight of the wise and the simple for twelve centuries now, 
 is contained almost fully developed, from beginning to end, 
 but clearer, purer, and incomparably more poetically con- 
 ceived, in our Targum-Haggadah. 
 
 The Editio Princeps dates Leiria, 1494. The later editions 
 are embodied in the Antwerp, Paris, and London Polyglotts. 
 Several single books have likewise been repeatedly edited 
 (com. Wolff, Le Long, Eosenmuller, &c). 
 
 Judges V. 
 
 AUTHORISED VERSION. 
 
 TARGUM [Jonathan ben Uzziel] 
 TO THE PROPHETS. 
 
 1 Then sang Deborah and Barak 
 the son of Abinoam on that day, 
 
 saying, 
 
 2 Praise ye the Lord for the 
 avenging of Israel, when the people 
 willingly offered themselves. 
 
 1 And Deborah and Barak the 
 son of Abinoam gave praise for the 
 miracle and the salvation which were 
 wrought for Israel on that day, and 
 spake : 
 
 2 When the children of Israel 
 rebel against the Law, then the na- 
 tions come over them and drive them 
 out of their cities ; but when they 
 
 return to do the Law, then they are mighty over their enemies, 
 and drive them out from the whole territory of the land of Israel. 
 Thus has been broken Sisra and all his armies to his punishment, 
 and to a miracle and a salvation for Israel. Then the wise re- 
 turned to sit in the houses of the synagogue . . . and to teach 
 unto the people the doctrine of the Law. Therefore praise ye 
 and bless the Lord. 
 
 3 Hear, ye kings (ye who came 
 with Sisra to the battle-array), listen, 
 ye rulers [ye who were with Jabin 
 the king of Kenaan : not with your 
 armies nor with your power have ye 
 
 conquered and become mighty over the house of Israel] — said 
 Deborah in prophecy before God: I praise, give thanks and 
 
 blessings before the Lord, the God 
 
 of Israel. 
 
 4 [0 Lord, Thy Law which Thou 
 gavest to Israel, when they trans- 
 gress it, then the nations rule over 
 them : but when they return to it, 
 then they become powerful over 
 their enemies.] Lord, on the day 
 
 3 Hear, ye kings ; give ear, 
 ye princes ; I, even I, will sing unto 
 the Lord ; I will sing praise to the 
 Lord God of Israel. > 
 
 4 Lord, when thou wentest out 
 of Seir, when thou marchedst out 
 of the field of Edom, the earth 
 trembled, and the heavens dropped, 
 the clouds also dropped water. 
 
 when Thou didst reveal Thyself to give it unto them from Seir,
 
 376 
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 AUTHORISED VERSION. 
 
 [TARGUM Jonathan bp.n Uzziel] 
 TO THE PROPHETS. 
 
 5 The mountains melted from 
 before the Lord, even that Sinai from 
 before the Lord God of Israel. 
 
 6 In the days of Shamgar the son 
 of Anath, in the days of Jael, the 
 highways were unoccupied, and the 
 travellers walked through byways. 
 
 7 The inhabitants of the villages 
 ceased, they ceased in Israel, until 
 that I Deborah arose, that I arose a 
 mother in Israel. 
 
 8 They chose new gods ; then was 
 war in the gates ; was there a shield 
 or spear seen among forty thousand 
 in Israel ? 
 
 Thou becamest manifest unto them in the splendour of Thy 
 glory over the territories of Edom : the earth trembled, the 
 
 heavens showered down, the clouds 
 
 dropped rain. 
 
 5 The mountains trembled before 
 the Lord, the mountains of Tabor, 
 the mountain of Herrnon, and the 
 mountain of Carmel, spake with 
 
 each other, and said one to the other : LTpon me the Shechinah 
 will rest, and to me will it come. But the Shechinah rested upon 
 Mount Sinai, which is the weakest and smallest of all the moun- 
 tains. . . . This Sinai trembled and shook, and its smoke went 
 up as goes up the smoke of an oven : because of the glory of the 
 
 God of Israel which had manifested 
 
 itself upon it. 
 
 6 When they transgressed in the 
 days of Shamgar the son of Anath 
 in the days of Jael, ceased the way- 
 farers : they who had walked in 
 well-prepared ways had again to 
 walk in furtive paths. 
 
 7 Destroyed were the open cities 
 of the land of Israel : their inha- 
 bitants were shaken off and driven 
 about, until I, Deborah, was sent to 
 prophesy over the house of Israel. 
 
 8 When the children of Israel 
 went to pray unto new idols [errors], 
 which recently had come to be wor- 
 shipped, with which their fathers 
 did not concern themselves, there 
 
 came over them the nations and drove them out of their cities : 
 but when they returned to the Law, they could not prevail 
 against them until they made themselves strong, and Sisra went 
 up against them, the enemy and the adversary, with forty thou- 
 sand chiefs of troops, with fifty thousand holders of the sword, 
 with sixty thousand holders of spears, with seventy thousand 
 holders of shields, with eighty thousand throwers of arrows and 
 slings, besides nine hundred iron chariots which he had with 
 him, and his own chariots. All these thousands and all these 
 hosts could not stand before Barak and the ten thousand men he 
 — i had with him. 
 
 9 Spake Deborah in prophecy : I 
 am sent to praise the scribes of 
 Israel, who, while this tribulation 
 lasted, ceased not to study in the 
 Law: and it redounds well unto 
 
 them who sat in the houses of congregation, wide open, and 
 taught the people the doctrine of the Law, and praised and ren- 
 
 ! 1 dered thanks before the Lord. 
 
 10 Speak, ye that ride on white 10 Those who had interrupted 
 
 9 My heart is toward the go- 
 vernors of Israel, that offered them- 
 selves willingly among the people. 
 Bless ye the Lord.
 
 ON THE TABGUMS. 
 
 AUTHORISED VERSION. 
 
 asses, ye that sit in judgment, and 
 walk by the way. 
 
 TARGUM [Jonathan ben Uzziel] 
 TO THE PROPHETS. 
 
 their occupations are riding on asses 
 covered with many-coloured capa- 
 risons, and they ride about freely in 
 
 all the territory of Israel, and congregate to sit in judgment. 
 
 They walk in their old ways, and are speaking of the power Thou 
 
 hast shown in the land of Israel, &c. 
 
 Judges XI. 
 
 39 And it came to pass, at the 
 end of two months, that she re- 
 turned unto her father, who did 
 with her according to his vow which 
 he had vowed : and she knew no 
 man. And it was a custom in 
 Israel. 
 
 39 And it was at the end of two 
 months, and she returned to her 
 father, and he did unto her accord- 
 ing to the vow which he had vowed : 
 and she had known no man. And 
 it became a statute in Israel, 
 
 Addition (nDDIfi), that no man 
 should offer up his son or his daugh- 
 ter as a burnt-offering, as Jephta the Gileadite did, who asked 
 not Phinehas the priest. If he had asked Phinehas the priest, 
 then he would have dissolved his vow with money [for animal 
 sacrifices]. 
 
 1 Sam. II. 
 
 
 1 And Hannah prayed, and said, 
 My heart rejoiceth in the Lord ; 
 mine horn is exalted in the Lord ; 
 my mouth is enlarged over mine 
 enemies; because I rejoice in thy 
 salvation. 
 
 1 And Hannah prayed in the 
 spirit of prophecy, and said: [Lo, 
 my son Samuel will become a pro- 
 phet over Israel ; in his days they 
 will be freed from the hand of the 
 Philistines ; and through his hands 
 
 1 shall be done unto them wondrous 
 
 and mighty deeds : therefore] be strong my heart in the portion 
 which God gave me. [And also Heman the son of Joel, the son 
 of my son Samuel, shall arise, he and his fourteen sons, to say 
 praise with nablia (harps ?) and cythers, with their brethren the 
 Levites, to sing in the house of the sanctuary : therefore] Let 
 my horn be exalted in the gift which God granted unto me. 
 [And also on the miraculous punishment that would befal the 
 Philistines who would bring back the ark of the Lord in a new 
 chariot, together with a sin-offering : therefore let the congrega- 
 tion of Israel say] I will open my mouth to speak great things 
 
 over my enemies ; because I rejoice 
 
 in thy salvation. 
 
 2 [Over Sanherib the king of 
 Ashur did she prophesy, and she 
 said : He will arise with all his 
 armies over Jerusalem, and a great 
 
 sign will be done with him. There shall fall the corpses of his 
 troops : Therefore praise ye all the peoples and nations and 
 tongues, and cry] : There is none holy but God ; there is not 
 
 2 TJtere is none holy as the Lord : 
 for there is none beside thee, neither 
 is there any rock like our God.
 
 S7S 
 
 OX THE TABGUMS. 
 
 AUTHORISED VERSION. 
 
 TARGUM [Jonathan ben Uzziki.] 
 TO THE PROPHETS. 
 
 beside thee ; and Thy people shall say, There is none mighty 
 but our God. 
 
 3 [Over Nebuchadnezzar the king 
 of Babel did she prophesy and say : 
 Ye Chaldeans, and all nations who 
 will once rule over Israel] Do not 
 speak grandly; let no blasphemy 
 go out from your mouth : for God 
 knows all, and over all his servants 
 he extends his judgment ; also from 
 you he will take punishment of 
 your guilt. 
 
 4 [Over the kingdom Javau she 
 prophesied and said] The bows of 
 the mighty ones [of the Javanites] 
 will be broken ; [and those of the 
 house of the Asmoneans] who are 
 weak, to them will be done miracles 
 and mighty deeds. 
 
 3 Talk no more so exceeding 
 proudly; let not arrogancy come 
 out of your mouth : for the Lord is 
 a God of knowledge, and by him 
 actions are weighed. 
 
 4 The bows of the mighty are 
 broken, and they that stumbled are 
 girded with strength. 
 
 1 Sam. XVII. 
 
 8 And he stood and cried unto 
 the armies of Israel, and said unto 
 them, Why are ye come out to set 
 your battle in array ? Am not I a 
 Philistine, and ye servants to Said? 
 choose you a man for you, and let 
 him come down to me. 
 
 8 And he arose and he cried unto 
 the armies of Israel, and said unto 
 them : Why have you put your- 
 selves in battle array ? Am I not 
 the Philistine, and you the servants 
 of Saul? [I am Goliath the Phi- 
 listine from Gath, who have killed 
 the two sons of Eli, the priests 
 Chofna and Phinehas, and carried captive the ark of the covenant 
 of the Lord, I who have carried it to the house of Dagon, my 
 Error, and it has been there in the cities of the Philistines seven 
 months. And in every battle which the Philistines have had I 
 went at the head of the army, and we conquered in the battle, 
 and we strew the killed like the dust of the earth, and until now 
 have the Philistines not thought me worthy to become captain of 
 a thousand over them. And you, children of Israel, what 
 mighty deed has Saul the son of Kish from Gibeah done for you 
 that you made him king over you ? If he is a valiant man, let 
 him come out and do battle with me ; but if he is a weak man], 
 then choose for yourselves a man, and let him come out against 
 me, &c 
 
 1 Kings XIX. 
 
 11, 12 And he said, Go forth, 
 and stand upon the mount before 
 the Lord. And, behold, the Lord 
 
 11, 12 And he said [to Elijah], 
 Arise and stand on the mountain 
 before the Lord. And God revealed
 
 ON THE TAEGUMS. 
 
 AUTHORISED VERSION. 
 
 TARGUM [Jonathan ben Uzziel] 
 TO THE PROPHETS. 
 
 passed by, and a great and strong 
 wind rent the mountains, and brake 
 in pieces the rocks, before the Lord ; 
 but the Lord iv as not in the wind : 
 and after the wind an earthquake; 
 but the Lord ivas not in the earth- 
 quake : and after the earthquake a 
 fire ; but the Lord was not in the 
 fire : and after the fire a still small 
 voice. 
 
 himself: and before him a host of 
 angels of the wind, cleaving the 
 mountain and breaking the rocks 
 before the Lord; but not in the 
 host of angels w r as the Shechinah. 
 And after the host of the angels of 
 the wind came a host of angels of 
 commotion ; but not in the host of 
 the angels of commotion was the 
 Shechinah of the Lord. And after 
 the host of the angels of commotion 
 I came a host of angels of fire ; but not in the host of the angels 
 of fire was the Shechinah of the Lord. But after the host of the 
 
 I 1 angels of the fire came voices singing 
 
 in silence. 
 13 And it was so, when Elijah 13 And it was when Elijah heard 
 
 heard it, that he wrapped his face this, he hid his face in his mantle,, 
 in his mantle, and went out, and and he went out and he stood at 
 stood in the entering in of the cave : the door of the cave ; and, lo ! with 
 and, behold, there came a voice unto him was a voice, saying, What 
 him, and said, What doest thou doest thou here, Elijah ! &c. 
 here, Elijah? 
 
 Isaiah XXXIII. 
 
 22 For the Lord is our judge, 
 the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord 
 is our king ; he will save us. 
 
 22 For the Lord is our judge, 
 who delivered us with his power 
 from Mizraim ; the Lord is our 
 teacher, for He has given us the 
 doctrine of the Torah from Sinai ; the Lord is our king : He 
 will deliver us, and give us righteous restitution from the army 
 of Goa;. 
 
 Jeeemiah X. 
 
 11 Thus shall ye say unto them, 
 The gods that have not made the 
 heavens and the earth, even they 
 shall perish from the earth, and 
 from under these heavens. 
 
 11 This is the copy of the letter 
 which Jeremiah the prophet sent to 
 the remaining ancient ones of the 
 captivity in Babel: "And if the 
 nations among whom you are will 
 say unto you, Pray to our Errors : — 
 house of Israel, then you shall answer thus, and speak in this 
 wise : The Errors unto which you pray are Errors which are of 
 no use : they cannot rain from heaven ; they cannot cause fruit 
 to grow from the earth. They and their worshippers will perish 
 from the earth, and will be destroyed from under these heavens."
 
 380 
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 MlCAH VI. 
 
 AUTHORISED VERSION. 
 
 TARiiL'51 [Jonathan ben Uzziel] 
 TO THE PROPHETS. 
 
 4 For I brought the.e up out of 
 the land of Egypt, and redeemed 
 thee out of the house of servants ; 
 and I sent before thee Moses, Aaron, 
 and Miriam. 
 
 4 For I have taken thee out from 
 the land of Mizraim, and have re- 
 leased thee from the house of thy 
 bondage ; and have sent before thee 
 three prophets : Moses, to teach 
 thee the tradition of the ordinances; 
 Aaron, to atone for the people ; and 
 Miriam to teach the women. 
 
 III. and IV. Taegum of Jonathan ben Uzziel and 
 Jertjshalmi-Taegum on the Pentateuch. 
 
 Onkelos and Jonathan on the Pentateuch and Prophets, 
 whatever be their exact date, place, authorship and editor- 
 ship, are, as we have endeavoured to show, the oldest of 
 existing Targums, and belong, in their present shape, to 
 Babylon and the Babylonian academies flourishing between 
 the 3rd and 4th centuries a.d. But precisely as two parallel 
 and independent developments of the Oral Law (syyf}) 
 have sprung up in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds 
 respectively, so also recent investigation has proved to 
 demonstration the existence of two distinct cycles of Targums 
 on the Written Law (^J-Qlttfri) — i>e- the entire body of 
 the Old Testament. Both are the offspring of the old, 
 primitive institution of the public " reading and translating 
 of the Torah," which for many hundred years had its place 
 in the Palestinian synagogues. The one first collected, 
 revised, and edited in Babylon, called — more especially that 
 part of it which embraced the Pentateuch (Onkelos) — the 
 Babylonian, Ours, by way of eminence, on account of the 
 superior authority inherent in all the works of the Madinchae 
 (Babylonians, in contradistinction to the Maarbae or Pales- 
 tinians). The other, continuing its oral life, so to say, down 
 to a much later period, was written and edited — less carefully, 
 or rather with a much more faithful retention of the oldest
 
 OX THE TARGUMS. 381 
 
 and youngest fancies of Meturgemanini and Darshanim — on 
 the soil of Judaea itself. On this entire cycle, however, the 
 Pentateuch and a few other books and fragmentary pieces 
 only have survived entire, while of most of the other books 
 of the Bible a few detached fragments are all that is known, 
 and this chiefly from quotations. The injunction above 
 mentioned respecting the sabbatical reading of the Targurn 
 on the Pentateuch — nothing is said of the Prophets — explains 
 the fact, to a certain extent, how the Pentateuch Targum 
 has been religiously preserved, while the others have perished. 
 This circumstance, also, is to be taken into consideration, 
 that Palestine was in later centuries well-nigh cut off from 
 communication with the Diaspora, while Babylon, and the 
 gigantic literature it produced, reigned paramount over all 
 Judaism, as, indeed, down to the 10th century, the latter 
 continued to have a spiritual leader in the person of the Eesh 
 Gelutha (Head of the Golah), residing in Babylon. As not 
 the least cause of the loss of the great bulk of the Palestinian 
 Targum may also be considered the almost uninterrupted 
 martyrdom to which those were subjected who preferred, 
 under all circumstances, to live and die in the Land of 
 Promise. 
 
 However this may be, the Targum on the Pentateuch has 
 come down to us : and not in one, but in two recensions. 
 More surprising still, the one hitherto considered a fragment, 
 because of its embracing portions only of the individual 
 books, has in reality never been intended to embrace anv 
 further portion, and we are thus in the possession of two 
 Palestinian Targums, preserved in their original forms. The 
 one, which extends from the first verse of Genesis to the last 
 of Deuteronomy, is known under the name of Targum 
 Jonathan (ben Uzziel) or Pseudo-Jonathan on the Pentateuch. 
 The other, interpreting single verses, often single words onlv, 
 is extant in the following proportions : a third on Genesis, a 
 fourth on Deuteronomy, a fifth on Numbers, three-twentieths 
 on Exodus, and about one-fourteenth on Leviticus. The 
 latter is generally called Targum Jerushalmi, or, down to the 
 11 th century (Hai Gaon, Chananel), Targum Erets Israel,
 
 382 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 Targum of Jerusalem or of the laud of Israel. That Jouathau 
 beu Uzziel, the same to whom the prophetical Targum is 
 ascribed, aud who is reported to have lived either in the 5th- 
 1th century B.C., or about the time of Christ himself (see 
 above), could have little to do with a Targum which speaks 
 of Constantinople (Num. xxiv. 19, 24), describes very plainly 
 the breaking-up of the West-Koman Empire (Num. xxiv. 
 19-24), mentions the Turks (Gen. x. 2), and even Moham- 
 med's two wives, Chadidja and Fatime (Gen. xxi. 21), and 
 which, exhibits not only the fullest acquaintance with the 
 edited body of the Babylonian Talmud, by quoting entire 
 passages from it, but adopts its peculiar phraseology: — not 
 to mention the complete disparity between the style, lan- 
 guage, and general manner of the Jonathanic Targum on the 
 Prophets, and those of this one on the Pentateuch, strikingly 
 palpable at first sight, — w r as recognised by early investigators 
 (jMorinus, Pfeiffer, Walton, &c), who soon overthrew the old 
 belief in Jonathan b. Uzziel's authorship, as upheld by 
 Menahem Rekanati, Asariah de Rossi, Gedaljah, Galatin, 
 Fagius, &c. Bat the relation in which the two Targums, so 
 similar and yet so dissimilar, stood to each other, how they 
 arose, and where and when — all these questions have for a 
 long time, in the terse words of Zunz, caused many of the 
 learned such dire misery, that whenever the "Targum 
 Hierosolymitanum comes up," they, instead of information 
 on it and its twin-brother, prefer to treat the reader to a 
 round volley of abuse of them. Not before the first half of 
 this century did the fact become fully and incontestably 
 established (by the simple process of an investigation of the 
 sources), that both Targums are in reality one — that both 
 were known down to the 14th century under no other name 
 than Targum Jerushalmi — and that some forgetful scribe 
 about that time must have taken the abbreviation "»"/!- 
 ' T. JJ over one of the two documents, and, instead of dis- 
 solving it into Targum Jerushalmi, dissolved it erroneously 
 into what he must till then have been engaged in copying — 
 viz. Targum- Jonathan, sc. ben Uzziel (on the Prophets). 
 This error, fostered by the natural tendency of giving a well-
 
 ON THE TAEGUMS. 383 
 
 known and far-famed name— without inquiring too closely 
 into its accuracy — to a hitherto anonymous and compara- 
 tively little known version, has been copied again and again, 
 until it found its way, a hundred years later, into print. Of 
 the intermediate stage, when only a few MSS. had received 
 the new designation, a curious fact, which Azariah de Eossi 
 (Cod. 37 b) mentions, gives evidence. " I saw," he says, 
 "two complete Targums on the whole Pentateuch, word for 
 word alike ; one in Keggio, which was described in the 
 margin, ' Targum of Jonathan b. Uzziel ; ' the other in 
 Mantua, described at the margin as ' Targum Jerushalmi.' " 
 In a similar manner quotations from either in the Aruch 
 confound the designation. Benjamin Mussaphia (d. 1674), 
 the author of additions and corrections to the Aruch, has 
 indeed pronounced it as his personal conjecture that both 
 may be one and the same, and Drusius Mendelssohn, Eappo- 
 port, and others shared his opinion. Yet the difficulty of 
 their obvious dissimilarity, if they were identical, remained 
 to be accounted for. Zunz tries to solve it by assuming that 
 Pseudo-Jonathan is the original Targum, and that the frag- 
 mentary Jerushalmi is a collection of variants to it. The 
 circumstance of its also containing portions identical with the 
 codex, to which it is supposed to be a collection of readings, 
 he explains by the negligence of the transcriber. Frankel, 
 however, followed by Traub and Levysohn, has gone a step 
 further. From the very identity of a proportionately large 
 number of places, amounting to about thirty in each book, 
 and from certain palpable and consistent differences which 
 run through both recensions, they have arrived at a different 
 conclusion, which seems to carry conviction on the face of it, 
 viz., that Jerushalmi is a collection of emendations and 
 additions to single portions, phrases, and words of Onkelos, 
 and Pseudo- Jonathan a further emendated and completed 
 edition to the whole Pentateuch of Jernshalmi-Onkelos. 
 The chief incentive to a new Targum on the Pentateuch 
 (that of Onkelos being well known in Palestine), was, on the 
 one hand, the wish to explain such of the passages as seemed 
 either obscure in themselves or capable of greater adaptation
 
 384 OX THE TAKGUMS. 
 
 to the times ; and on the other hand the great and para- 
 mount desire for legendary lore, and ethical and homiletical 
 motives, intertwined with the very letter of Scripture, did 
 not and could not feel satisfied with the (generally) strictly 
 literal version of Onkelos, as soon as the time of eccentric 
 prolix, oral Targums had finally ceased in Palestine too, and 
 written Targums of Babylon were introduced as a substitute, 
 once for all. Hence variants, exactly as found in Jerushalmi, 
 not to the whole of Onkelos, but to such portions as seemed 
 most to require " improvement " in the direction indicated. 
 .Vml how much this thoroughly paraphrastic version was 
 preferred to the literal is, among other signs, plainly visible 
 from the circumstance that it is still joined, for instance, to 
 the reading of the Decalogue on the Feast of Weeks in the 
 synagogue. At a later period the gaps were filled up, and 
 the whole of the existing Jerushalmi was recast, as far again 
 as seemed fitting and requisite. This is the Jonathan, so 
 called for the last four hundred years only. And thus the 
 identity in some, and the divergence in other places finds its 
 most natural solution. 
 
 The Jerushalmi, in both its recensions, is written in the 
 Palestinensian dialect, the peculiarities of which we have 
 briefly characterised above. It is older than the Masora and 
 the conquest of Western Asia by the Arabs. Syria or Pales- 
 tine must be its birthplace, the second half of the 7th century 
 its date, since the instances above given will not allow of any 
 earlier time. Its chief aim and purpose is, especially in its 
 second edition, to form an entertaining compendium of all 
 the Halachah and Haggadah, which refers to the Pentateuch, 
 and takes its stand upon it. And in this lies its chief use to 
 us. There is hardly a single allegory, parable, mystic digres- 
 sion, or tale in it which is not found in the other Haggadistic 
 writings — Mishnah, Talmud, Mechilta, Sifra, Sifri, &c. ; and 
 both Winer and Petermann, not to mention the older autho- 
 rities, have wrongly charged it with inventing its interpre- 
 tations. Even where no source can be indicated, the author 
 has surely only given utterance to the leading notions and 
 ideas of his times, extravagant and abstruse as they may
 
 ON THE TAEGUMS. 385 
 
 oftentimes appear to our modern Western minds. Little 
 value is inherent in its critical emendations on the exegesis 
 of Onkelos. It sometimes endeavours either to find an 
 entirely new signification for a word, and then it often falls 
 into grave errors, or it restores interpretations rejected by 
 Onkelos; but it must never be forgotten that translation is 
 quite a secondary object with Jerushalmi. It adheres, how- 
 ever, to the general method followed by Onkelos and 
 Jonathan. It dissolves similes and widens too concise 
 diction. Geographical names it alters into those current in 
 its own day. It avoids anthropomorphisms as well as an- 
 thropopathisms. The strict distinction between the Divine 
 Being and man is kept up, and the word mp " before " is 
 put as a kind of medium between the former and the latter, 
 no less than the other — " Shechinah," " Word," " Glory," &c. 
 It never uses Elohim where the Scripture applies it to man 
 or idols. The same care is taken to extol the good deeds of 
 the people and its ancestors, and to slur over and excuse the 
 evil ones, &c. : — all this, however, in a much more decided 
 and exaggerated form than either in Onkelos or Jonathan. 
 Its language and grammar are very corrupt ; it abounds — 
 chiefly in its larger edition, the Pseudo-Jonathan — in Greek, 
 Latin, Persian, and Arabic words ; and even making allow- 
 ances for the many blunders of ignorant scribes, enough will 
 remain to pronounce the diction ungrammatical in very 
 many places. 
 
 Thus much briefly of the Jerushalmi as one and the same 
 work. We shall now endeavour to point out a few cha- 
 racteristics belonging to its two recensions respectively. The 
 first, Jerushalmi /car i^ox>)v, knows very little of angels ; 
 Michael is the only one ever occurring: in Jonathan, on the 
 other hand, angelology flourishes in great vigour: to the 
 Biblical Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, are added the Angel of 
 Death, Samael, Sagnugael, Shachassai, Usiel ; seventy angels 
 descend with God to see the building of the Babylonian 
 tower ; nine hundred millions of punishing angels go through 
 Egypt during the night of the Exodus, &c. Jerushalmi 
 makes use but rarely of Halachah and Haggadah, while 
 
 2 c
 
 38(3 
 
 OX THE TABGUMS. 
 
 Jonathan sees the text as it were only through the medium 
 of Ha^aadah : to him the chief end. Hence Jonathan has 
 many Midrashim not found in Jerushalmi, while he does not 
 omit a single one contained in the latter. There are no 
 direct historical dates in Jerushalmi, but many are found in 
 Jonathan, and. since all other signs indicate that but a short 
 space of time intervenes between the two, the late origin of 
 either is to a great extent made manifest by these dates. 
 The most striking difference between them, however, and 
 the one which is most characteristic of either, is this, that 
 while Jerushalmi adheres more closely to the language of 
 the Mishnah, Jonathan has greater affinity to that of the 
 Talmud. Of either we subjoin short specimens, which, for 
 the purpose of easier comparison and reference, we have 
 placed side by side with Onkelos. The Targum Jerushalmi 
 was first printed in Bomberg's Bible, Venice, 1518, ff., and 
 was reprinted in Bomberg's edd., and in Walton, vol. iv. 
 Jonathan to the Pentateuch, a MS. of which was first dis- 
 covered by Ashur Purinz in the Library of the family of the 
 Puahs in Venice, was printed for the first time in 1590, as 
 "Targum Jonathan ben Uzziel," at Venice, reprinted at 
 Hanau, 1618, Amsterdam, 1640, Prague, 1646, Walton, 
 vol. iv., &c.
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 187 
 
 CM 
 
 I 
 
 Z 
 
 r-k 
 
 2 
 
 o 
 
 o S 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 p 
 
 co 
 
 > 
 
 to 
 
 CS 
 
 03 
 
 o 
 
 CO 03 O -^ 03 O 
 
 
 sS^o^ 
 
 o g.o 43 ^4 
 
 or: 5 
 
 3 *0 *P ,P 
 
 <1 
 
 a s 
 
 - i ^ 
 
 03 2 2 
 
 S ? P-5 2 
 
 on 
 
 s 
 
 C3 
 ■/- 
 
 e3 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 CO 
 
 5 
 
 03 
 % — 1 CO 
 
 2 "el 
 03 
 ^» 
 
 '-3 a 
 P ~* 
 
 4h 
 O 
 
 03 
 O 
 
 «s 
 
 03 
 
 CO 
 
 a 
 
 03 
 
 
 P -a 
 
 S a 
 
 S ° 
 
 O 03 
 
 -— 
 
 O 
 
 03 
 
 03 
 
 <42 
 a; 
 
 r a pi 
 
 03 ; — 
 
 J'S 
 
 03 +> 
 
 o 
 
 — 
 
 o 
 .2 
 
 
 03 
 03 
 
 o 
 
 •a g 
 
 ^1 
 
 - 
 
 K 
 
 03 "3 
 
 03 
 
 03 -U 
 
 
 g'fe 
 
 "*- ** 
 
 03 
 03 
 ,£2 
 
 +3 
 
 -fj 
 
 b 9 
 
 o 
 
 -r. 
 
 : 
 
 +3 
 
 ***! =3 
 
 o 
 
 ■n 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 
 •_ 
 
 ""■ 
 
 ^ 
 
 >>^ 
 
 P2 „ 
 
 
 >>N 
 
 
 = . 
 
 p 
 
 
 O T*J 
 co a 
 
 2 a 
 
 OtJ 
 
 < 
 
 tZ , 
 
 CO 
 
 2 <"" 
 
 -*3 
 
 S "3 
 
 S 
 
 CO 
 
 c 
 
 03 
 
 > 
 
 
 
 ^ CO 
 03 tH 
 
 ^ 03 
 
 C3 riSJ 
 
 V3 
 CO 
 
 -d 
 
 ^2 
 
 4 
 ci 03 
 
 CO 
 
 •v: 
 eS 
 
 2 8 
 
 
 — . 
 
 ~ 
 
 o 
 
 co 
 
 •3 
 
 p" a 
 
 CO CO 
 
 tjfltpl 
 
 ^H r^ 
 
 a-s 
 
 Sb<a s 
 
 C 
 
 4^ "-t - 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 CO 
 
 r; •« - 
 
 "• 03 03 03 
 
 03 03 ^2 -^ 
 
 .« 
 
 , 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 +s 
 
 a •*? ~ 
 
 £> 2 r^ ^ 
 
 4*3* 
 
 -£ 
 
 . •„ 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 
 
 CO 
 
 ly for thee ; 
 the grass tha 
 he earth. T 
 
 <*. 03 -w 
 
 1—1 .2 a a 
 
 •-! 03 >^ __ . 
 
 o ^^^ 
 
 O es 
 
 a 
 
 03 
 03 
 
 ci 
 
 oc-2 
 
 
 
 
 
 a 
 
 _r+D to 03 
 
 .S rt p 2 
 
 CO ^~> 
 
 t-< P a ^ 
 
 to ~ S a 
 
 ®^' 03 S 
 
 o 
 
 03 
 
 -> s 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 
 CO 
 
 rrt >»r2 
 TJ O 03 
 
 CO 
 
 03 
 
 ^ i" 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 P !r! •> 2 
 
 
 
 
 ■■s^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 Ch w ^ 
 
 rt 03 ^ ._o 
 
 -n ° js a 
 
 •— 
 
 ^ 
 
 a* 
 
 
 
 
 
 +i 
 
 2 So 
 
 a e3 "3 
 P > ^ 
 
 03 
 
 cS 
 
 P 
 
 
 
 
 
 "3 
 
 & j, 03 
 
 as 2 
 
 i, 03 +j c^ 
 
 ^ rP r— O 
 
 ^ 
 
 S 
 
 < 
 
 
 
 
 
 -9 
 
 °3 
 
 •~S "aS 03 
 
 _ to a 
 
 a p 03 p 
 
 CS O 03 O 
 
 m o.t: o 
 » o S „ 
 
 o 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 5 2 r- 
 
 tD^ - o 
 
 c; y b. 03 
 
 03 P 0) J3 
 
 5 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 'v: "^ O -3 "3 E -1 c: 
 
 . : 
 
 A 
 
 
 o'S a a 
 
 CO 
 
 1 
 
 03 
 
 ^5 K*> 
 CO C4_, 
 
 03 
 
 3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^2 03 (J _ 
 
 a 
 
 ^3 
 
 o 
 
 CO 
 
 T3 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 on 
 
 O 
 
 -; 
 
 a* 03 9 
 
 J si o« 
 
 S 03 c5 
 
 -J U ",3 
 
 a 
 
 03 
 
 03 
 
 C3 
 
 ^ CO 
 +a 03 
 
 a 
 
 CO 
 
 3 03 
 
 C5 ^ 
 
 03 Q 
 03 ° 
 
 ^3 CO 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^3 S _^ ° 
 
 3 rt rt ^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 ,2 ^ c 
 
 03 
 
 
 
 
 
 O 
 
 O 
 
 o a 
 
 , 
 
 ' S ^ 
 
 O 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 < 2 ^ o 
 
 p "rt 
 
 £0 
 
 03 O 
 
 ■3 
 
 5 ^> 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 03 
 
 a § 
 
 C3 — 
 
 C3 
 CO 
 
 C/3 03 
 
 >i C 
 
 < 
 
 trj g 
 
 ~ "rt 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 *= '— ■ -a 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 -p o -^ 
 
 C r -1 
 
 03 
 
 ** "~ 
 
 
 CO '/3 
 
 
 
 
 
 _r-P -P 
 « P ccj _ 
 
 73 03 p£< t 
 
 03 -S -«" 
 
 4 cs -r < 
 
 03 £ 
 
 . r-t ^ 
 
 3 >> 
 
 ^3 ^ -a 
 
 4 O 03 
 ■iS 03 -^ 
 
 a a .03 1 _ , 
 
 -P P 03 
 03 O rP 
 
 a j *- 
 _ tL-a 
 oT ^ p 
 
 g J5 03 
 
 +^ « .. 
 
 03 j_, 
 03 03 .P 
 
 3 s 
 
 U V gg 
 
 PI'S ° 
 
 03 d -U ' 
 
 a 1 2, 
 
 ° a 
 
 pq 
 
 a ^ a « ^ 
 
 ■«§ sod*' 
 PH co tJj co O 
 
 .4* 
 
 "^ ^2 *" 
 
 cc tO o 
 
 a .p 
 
 COS PrlT 
 
 h cs o3 
 
 2 c 2
 
 588 
 
 ON THE TAKGUMS. 
 
 hI 
 
 P 
 
 a 
 
 
 palm 
 
 food, 
 
 the 
 
 ■ o 
 
 p +j 
 
 03 r— 
 
 O 
 
 o 
 <x> 
 
 c2 
 
 CO 
 
 
 20 And Adam called the name 
 of his wife Chavah ; for she is 
 the mother of all the sons of 
 
 
 rt 
 
 rt '." 
 
 SB 
 O 
 
 1 
 
 > 
 rt 
 
 2 
 
 H 
 
 rt 
 
 u 
 
 33 
 3£ 
 
 
 'rt 5 
 
 M .2 
 
 hi 
 
 ■— '-d I; 
 
 o 
 
 Pi 
 
 6 
 
 a 
 
 o 
 
 CO 
 
 03 
 
 O 
 O 
 
 "5 
 
 ce 
 O 
 
 CO 
 
 A) 
 
 p 
 
 oT 
 
 - 
 
 oJ 
 
 6 
 
 o 
 bj 
 
 i 
 
 o 
 03 
 
 PI 
 
 - 
 
 J2 H "S « * ,2 
 
 ^- a — o 'J 
 
 b ~ a - "S "S 
 
 2 SSl rt a 
 ■5'S g^a t§ g 
 
 . 3 o 2 M ii 
 
 • >» "" .."m 
 rH ■*" '■*■= «'§ as 
 
 o sr; tj-c 
 
 s 
 
 3 
 
 'E 
 
 3 
 
 -♦a 
 
 X 
 
 o 
 
 5 3 
 8 § 
 
 pi <ji 
 
 c; rt 
 
 5 o 
 
 -3 ^ 
 ,5, rt 
 
 p ** 
 
 CD 
 
 B 
 
 bi 
 
 i-s 
 S 
 
 G 
 
 o 
 
 C«-l 
 
 o 
 
 > 
 
 •X3 
 
 rt 
 
 a 
 
 ^ .03 <^ 
 
 "5 ^ a 
 
 S-s 1 
 
 J « 1 
 
 CO 
 
 5 3 
 
 rt 
 S 
 
 "3 
 
 s. 
 03 
 
 9 
 
 o 
 
 00 
 
 B 
 
 d 
 
 
 
 "3 
 o 
 
 '3 
 
 -*a 
 
 rt 
 V 
 
 DO 
 
 CC 
 
 03 
 
 3 
 nd 
 
 _3 
 
 2 03 
 
 W S3 
 
 "rt jj 
 
 - 5 
 
 li 
 
 'O to 
 
 < 5 
 
 03 
 
 •m _r: 
 
 CM *-" 
 
 o 
 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 rd 1—1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 fcD 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 P 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 O O 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 p 
 
 - 
 O 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 cell 
 
 rO 
 
 OJ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 T3 § 
 
 P5S 
 
 o 
 o 
 
 r2 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 O 
 
 > — 
 
 a » 
 
 
 -5 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 !> o 
 
 4»i 
 
 H 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 o — 
 
 
 
 ci 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 p 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 -H t? 
 
 3*« 
 
 ei 
 
 ^5 
 o 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 d co 
 
 <! 
 
 r= 
 
 C*— 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^ S 
 
 H 
 
 o 
 o 
 
 — 
 
 O 
 
 CO 
 
 o 
 
 05 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^ Id 
 
 <M D 
 
 
 
 
 
 Or-,— 
 
 ■w r-j 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 O '— — 
 
 
 D 
 
 i <— 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■> o 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 S 2 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 rt 
 
 tc pi 
 
 2 
 
 03 
 
 ,15: 
 
 03 
 
 
 
 
 
 12 d 
 rt o 
 
 CO 
 
 cc 
 
 
 
 
 O „ 03 
 
 =8 ^ 
 
 -rr CO 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 T3^ ° 
 ■— ; K o 
 
 rt rt -S 
 
 "Jo 
 
 O g 
 
 
 _o 
 
 v2 ^ 
 
 CO -t* 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 rd O 
 
 o 
 K 2 
 
 O 
 
 
 
 
 2 o H 
 
 rt 3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ,_, w 
 
 
 3 a 
 
 o 
 
 d 
 
 rt 
 
 0Q 
 
 
 
 
 
 rH -M 
 
 O 
 
 
 
 
 o « 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 5 =2 o 
 
 p 
 
 ci 
 
 "rt 
 > 
 
 
 Ha 
 
 o 
 
 1 b 
 
 _g 
 
 S "to 
 
 
 
 
 
 1.2 
 o 
 
 35 a 
 
 
 
 
 
 3 H B 
 
 d 
 
 5 i 
 
 _• 
 
 
 
 
 
 CO 
 
 Cm 
 
 a 
 
 ^^ c^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^3 
 
 
 
 
 
 os if a 
 
 [o 5 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 2 ^ 
 
 
 — 1 
 
 o g 
 
 — 
 
 
 
 
 
 CI rd 
 
 pa 
 
 
 
 
 
 rd 0) 
 CO !-• 
 
 f £ 
 
 p 
 
 
 
 
 
 CM a rt 
 
 rt -3 
 
 z 
 no 
 
 CM 
 
 s I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 V H43 
 
 -*J *3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 v; cp 
 
 
 o 
 
 <13 J 
 
 
 
 
 
 " CO 
 
 
 
 
 
 y o - 
 
 3 rt 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 To j 
 
 
 
 & a 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 12 =* 
 
 d 
 
 > 
 Q 
 
 
 
 
 ^6 
 
 a d 
 -w o p 
 
 p r3 Si 
 « rt rd 
 
 OJ -*-J 
 
 w cc 
 cS 2 
 
 rt £3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 fe CO 
 
 rt 
 CO > 
 
 ^ 2 
 5 s. 
 
 1 a i? - 
 
 « pi c 
 
 g s> 
 
 rt o ^ 
 
 
 
 
 rt 
 
 O 
 
 X 
 
 - 
 rt 
 
 rt D 
 
 S^ 
 
 ; 3 
 
 - o 
 
 5 o 
 o _ 
 H d 
 
 03 C3 
 
 •+J CO 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Si 03 
 
 -si 
 
 O 8 
 
 o 
 
 I 3 
 
 O 
 
 
 
 
 Jr- 5 
 
 ■5 « 
 
 CO *» 
 
 d 
 
 
 
 
 
 c > o 
 
 
 C 
 
 "~^ "~Xt 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 *• 0) 
 d 
 
 
 
 
 ^ d 
 
 rt h 
 
 4^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 P 
 
 03 <— . 
 
 "t: o 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^S 
 
 
 
 
 
 <a> if a 
 
 "" o 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 2-^= 
 
 
 CI 
 
 JS co 
 co rt 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 cq 33 
 
 
 
 
 
 .-3 83 
 
 O ^ 
 
 3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 w
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 389 
 
 "- 1 p P 
 
 J~ O CJ r& 
 
 ^3rP P3 p 
 
 S ^ *- £ eS 
 
 J2 to— cs £ 
 
 H o ^ o ^ 
 
 to H-( r ," r- -^ 
 
 -- ' 5 C«^ £ 9 o P ^ o 
 
 no S "S *2 -"^ P -S 3 o ^: ""P 
 
 ^ ~ K £ "£ ^ -S 5 ^ ><= •= a> !>,*' ^ 
 
 O O <P cs £ pj=f 
 
 5 p ?, J3 ° ~ ~ <" res .2 
 
 £ £ 1 p 1 g-S 
 
 a > 5b*'c> i ~ i »' r0 <2' j::: jlL,2 
 
 ^ ^- n n *r'A ""^ •™~ | ^^ c^ -^ til 
 
 .b<5 cs cs ^ ,p p^ o p: op; P cs 
 
 cS 5 tC 
 
 si? J §11§1 °> 
 s ,5 ? cs p cs pr^s s « - 
 
 £ tC _ G P< rrj O M rP ._ _- 
 
 ^-pS.g-o^^pp 
 
 „ -^ 5 P. P- O Ow.iii cS 
 
 .2 .2— > to-^ op 
 ^o^p?^,., u ^r 
 
 ct a ^M s^-g ot: 
 
 ^r= C3 r- S 
 
 o _ w.'T, P 
 „ o "T r , C3 P 
 
 c .S" - ^ o ^ ^ 
 
 
 ^^ g 
 
 o«2 
 
 S g fl o S^ s S •• 
 
 Kr/S - a <= r-, ^S P P 
 
 
 •»i o o o to o ■— ; 
 
 S C ^-=febrS^ 
 
 rt --- -^ o ^- r cs 
 
 _a^^ j/3 g tc o, 1 
 
 ^^ .9 -° ^S - rt " 
 x'5?^2 rt::3;; ~ 
 
 OOOrG -On-^ 
 O _ rP 3 J^ "~C ^ 
 
 . 6 ° g g'? p J 
 
 c>i ^3 g •Sb'S 2 £ g 
 
 c o o cs p; o c 
 
 CS "C ^ tt'^ r^J O 
 
 c3 .5f rt cs 
 
 c 'd ,cT . 
 bcj cs— 3 
 
 to . 'd 'o 3 
 
 ^ > p n 
 
 ™ 2 2 p > 
 
 •* p^ 2^ 
 111 S^ 
 
 +"5(1)0" 
 
 •r t< to *; 
 
 G r* -^ r— - CS 
 
 .S o »i rt o 
 
 op -s 
 
 tO ~ V3 'g 
 
 ^ o s o 
 "" S 5 « 
 
 S CJ rP i QJ 
 
 G g 
 
 CS 
 
 
 
 
 
 to ""O 
 
 
 
 pW 
 
 D 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 -o w 
 
 S p 
 
 0) 
 O 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 5 « 
 
 t?- 
 
 
 «* 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 •-3 — 
 
 2 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 a> 
 
 
 
 
 
 <q p 
 
 'ZZ 
 
 — • 
 
 
 
 
 01 s 
 
 3 
 
 o3 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■~ ' 
 
 *^ 
 
 
 O Qi 
 
 S 
 
 c 
 
 
 O'P 
 
 
 
 
 
 C -0T3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1-3 -S 
 
 p 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 
 
 
 
 2 S 
 
 5 ° 
 
 CD 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 -^^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 m 
 
 — 
 
 cs 
 
 4-> 
 
 > 
 
 p^ 
 
 O 
 
 
 
 <u 
 
 CJ 
 
 
 
 
 CO ^ 
 
 pcj 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 ■_ 
 
 "~ 
 
 •- G c 
 
 P O rP -^ 
 
 
 
 P T3 *^ 
 
 _5 '—' _j to 
 
 CJ 
 
 -=- to p C 
 ^, « 5 
 
 ~ 
 
 
 O 
 
 ^ .5 - 
 
 „ OrO O 
 
 
 s;<2 ^ 
 
 O 
 
 2^3 2 £ 
 
 ^£5 . 
 
 CS 
 
 J's o-s 
 
 ? 
 
 ^ «5 ° 
 
 CJ 
 
 ■^ 
 
 
 .C ^ P- 
 C-l ^3 rt cS 
 
 F-l 
 
 
 P «*-! ^3 
 
 cs O to 
 
 tC-P 
 
 • - 1 — its 
 
 >4-i 
 
 r^r'io 
 
 
 p^ .fi 
 
 g -d 
 
 CS 
 
 o _2 5- 
 
 P- - 'P M -P CZ 
 
 -= ^ «g g £ o 
 
 O "-' ° cS fe 
 
 CD o g "5P eu 
 
 ^H -P O CS Xi 
 
 P cs C > ^3 
 
 cs to cs cj ^
 
 390 
 
 OX THE TARGUMS. 
 
 '' — K 
 
 = <: 8 
 £»£ 
 I la's 
 
 kZ (V» ^ 
 
 - ;• 
 £> 
 
 bp 
 
 3 i' 
 
 a 
 
 C3 
 
 CO J*H ja ZLi G> -; 
 
 rt O -if o rtj 
 
 
 s_ <*, co <» 
 SS^'S tcfq 
 
 o o c a £ •? 
 
 "3 s ~ ~ - 
 
 oa •• e 
 
 . co 
 
 
 hBh,S 
 
 — a> •_; tt g .3 
 ^ rt 3 a> a) o 
 
 UiywrnnQ^u.^ 
 
 EC 
 
 -r 
 
 
 3 
 
 
 
 <*-. 
 
 
 - 
 
 o 
 
 CO 
 
 — j 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 Q 
 
 S ©S= - g S § > 
 
 f H O «) " S ^ 
 
 to bO»C o H " ' 
 
 •• Jl ^ 01 o 
 
 ,5i^ 
 
 
 .a ^o>^d cc o^^^ g «« 
 
 SS Q-'-S E= d O 
 
 a] 
 
 e3 O 
 
 
 c£ 
 
 ^3 ^ »-rt 
 
 
 
 ^3 .~ ~^— 
 
 V H rt 
 
 ^ c5 ~G — _C ^ ^ « ^ ^> *—• £- 
 
 a a f-r.^3 TS ~ -i- _d .» t3 =< O r- 1 
 
 ,-e -3 -3 E ."3 "3 
 
 G O T- 1 — T* 
 
 "5 rt O 
 
 Ed 
 
 Ji0J -" 
 pT2 £ 
 
 S 5 § 
 
 Co^SSiSfl 
 
 s -3^ 
 
 i O o <— < "" 
 
 ^ > •• ^ <a „ 
 
 ; o-~ § «* 
 
 ; § Z o oS-~ 
 1 O 2 o fe r-T^ 
 
 tn 
 
 w 
 
 O ^3 
 
 i^J^S^'i&Sa^f.a's 
 
 's si 
 
 
 ■S P 
 
 O! 
 
 
 .y w g 
 
 
 ^hJQ 
 
 2 S 
 g • P 8 ' 
 
 ^s 3 -e 
 
 ^ O — > O 
 
 "3 "^ -4J +J "- *-■ o 
 no fl o oj *a *g O
 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 391 
 
 K 
 
 ft 
 
 fa 
 O 
 
 « 
 
 fa" 
 
 fa 
 
 Eh 
 
 
 ascended from 
 b to the moun- 
 summit of the 
 >ver against Je- 
 )rd of Jehovah 
 ic mighty ones 
 
 OS 
 
 03 
 
 ^ 
 
 P 
 
 
 M O O 'o r-" 
 2^ ^ _.S 
 
 O 
 
 
 
 33 
 
 O 3 
 
 
 
 
 
 05 
 
 
 
 
 ■£ 
 
 5 
 
 *5 - ~" 
 
 c — .3 
 
 ~< 8 
 < DO ~- 
 
 §51 
 
 - 
 
 s 
 
 xn 
 
 a. 
 
 5 
 
 ea 
 
 
 
 03 
 O 
 
 e3 
 
 "c: 
 
 •3J O 
 3° ^ 
 .9 O 
 
 _2 
 
 3 
 01 
 
 
 
 33 
 
 O 
 
 
 •— 
 
 
 
 
 — 
 >— 
 
 
 »&; ^ ce 
 
 3 C3 3 r3 
 
 ED 
 
 Ea 
 
 1-: 
 
 3 
 
 
 g 
 
 
 
 c 
 
 =3 o " > -3 
 00 o 3 m £ *^ 
 
 O "^ 2 'rt 
 
 
 03 
 
 -g 
 
 
 
 DO 
 
 § 
 
 3: O ,3 cr. X2 
 
 a»-t3|S „ 
 
 2 ^^^ 
 
 -3 
 3 
 03 
 
 
 
 03 
 
 X 
 
 is 
 
 "o 
 
 73 
 
 
 
 2 
 
 p 
 
 _ ta ® ^3 t3 *a 
 
 O 3 Jz; £ 3 ~ 
 <3 -3 o - »S 
 
 
 
 s 
 
 (-3 
 
 Gy 
 
 O 
 
 X 
 
 3 
 
 c 
 
 '-' 3 O r- 
 
 £ 2-2^ P 
 
 <J ^ -3 ^ 
 
 ^H qj 03 _ 
 
 E 
 
 O 
 
 z 
 
 03 
 
 "5 
 
 3 o 
 
 a 3 
 
 1—1 3 
 
 05 2 
 
 
 — 
 — 
 
 < 
 
 < 
 
 ^ - •a 2 £ 
 
 i - ! O .3 •— -ri O 
 -C3 8 <" .2 — 
 
 +j i3 « a: 
 
 -4J 
 
 O 
 
 ^0 
 
 O 
 
 X 
 
 
 > 
 
 13 
 
 c 
 
 
 
 3£ 
 
 .3 •_ 
 -3 
 
 S3 
 
 
 
 c3 
 
 CO 
 
 
 S i 2 d^ i 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 go* 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 «s 5 £ -2 -S c 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^•S 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 2 g 
 
 3 o b •- =~ 
 
 O CJ .— ^» _3 _, 
 
 O .-* r- " — — ^ 
 o O h « — ►— 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^.cT^2^ 
 
 ■7^ •" "^ C3 
 
 3 ^— 3 "" 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Si 
 
 gc|°1i 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 3 "^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 J s £- % ^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^ 1| 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 55 
 
 S "5 -? _= «! _£ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 §•5^3= so 
 
 <-3*3 £0 .. 
 
 i-i m - — 'S ^ 
 
 -s 'J 3 -< J 
 
 ri 
 
 - 
 
 
 
 
 
 ""3 ^ 5 
 
 "'3 u I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 2 O*" lirj O 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 JJ •> 0J 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 a ~ o » <;, hj 
 
 0$3 ^f, g S 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 "*" * "^r 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 *•■< o « o o = 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 r;^0 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 3 33 " "3 x 08 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^. g « 03 
 
 "73 JS ^ OJ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 M 
 X, 
 
 © 
 
 -3 § 2 ^-^ 
 * *o o .2 Jq ° 
 
 BO -*a >g ® Tj 
 
 cj S ^ "3 ^> 3 
 
 8 2^i J 
 << E, o ^, a « 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 e a s-^~ 
 lill a 
 
 r- i o © 2 ~Xj a 
 
 5 a 5 •£ in 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 3 <_ _ O 
 CI *3 3; 3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 2 ' q - ^ 7S 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 3* 3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 J2 ^ 2 5 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 3: ^ Q 
 
 •" I " 
 
 CO H 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 !z5 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 a^o^S 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 es rt d 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 (3 
 
 ■»* &. E eS 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 S 3 a> -u '3 ^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 t3 o«^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 c 
 
 o 
 H 
 << 
 
 55 0/=l c K rt 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 , r-3 
 
 "^ "&. 2 -^ 
 
 '3 W 5 O 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 "^ 5? •£ ^ = 
 
 1-1 'rt .3 o3 w 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 *< "0^ -2 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 M'i'i s 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 33 |-5 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^1-1-s -^. -^ w 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 392 
 
 OX THE TARGUMS. 
 
 P 
 
 Sal 
 < ■/. ^ 
 
 IS* 
 
 o tc no *s{ v. 
 
 II 
 
 P3 Si 
 
 "3 *» 
 
 g '— © n3 •« o *e 
 
 o ^ ^r S s 8*i 
 t-i •#- ao — t_ 5? "»h 
 
 'Si 
 
 t 03 5 • 
 
 CO 
 
 o s 
 
 «.*^ °~=~ °^'p °J: « 
 
 O ft a O ^ ►*• **r2 
 
 otS S-- 
 
 0^" ;= -C-— < CO CO 
 
 f 72 ° a'C fe^« °3^' — is- * 
 •' o > += ■— , 
 
 _ g£^!^ 3 fi.g!3 e 
 
 ' r i* & * t w^'Srt . S J? a 12 « « 
 
 ■ • ' — 7- C5 O k. P £4 fl ~ * * 
 
 ; ® ~ ^ © ' „ g i^ «£ r^ | ^ O , S -7 
 
 ^ CC ° c~ £ - ° s= o = r= «. g 
 g _~ „ c ^ -= ■£ co a, £ to > .5 r> > 
 
 ! « S'a.-S si^goooo .So 
 :„c co .~ ~ J? •— g 5 o j cj r- _s «*- 3 r* 
 : <- — o ~C i-t 1 'O ^3 ftr^ 72 O S 7s O B 73 
 
 •3 ° 6 
 
 p o s 
 
 CO o^K 
 
 ' ' o 
 o « 
 
 S.2N 
 
 ',- <_ r- 
 
 r- O *^ 
 
 73 o s 
 
 c > ft 
 
 <i o a> 
 
 ft 
 
 rC O « 
 
 w 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^"fc 2 
 
 w 
 
 tj'-S c 
 
 cc 
 
 go . 
 
 « 
 
 
 
 >, 
 
 W 
 
 ,-s 
 
 H 
 
 
 P 
 
 1? * g 
 
 
 <1 0- 
 
 
 
 
 co ■>-• — 1 
 
 
 
 

 
 ON THE TARGUMS. 393 
 
 V. Targums of " Joseph the Bund " ox the 
 Hagiographa. 
 
 "When Jonathan ben Uzziel began to paraphrase the 
 Cetlmbim " (Hagiographa), we read in the Talmudical 
 passage before quoted, " a mysterious voice was heard sav- 
 ing : It is enough. Thou hast revealed the secrets of the 
 Prophets — why wouldst thou also reveal those of the Holy 
 Ghost ?" It would thus appear, that a Targum to these 
 books (Job excepted) was entirely unknown up to a very 
 late period. Those Targums on the Hagiographa which 
 Ave now possess have been attributed vaguely to different 
 authors, it being assumed in the first instance that they were 
 the work of one man. Now it was Akylas the Greek trans- 
 lator, mentioned in Bcreshith Rabba (see above) ; now 
 ( hikelos, the Chaldee translator of the Pentateuch, his 
 mythical double; now Jonathan b. Uzziel, or Joseph (Jose) 
 the Blind (see above). But the diversity in the different 
 parts of the work warring too palpably against the unity of 
 authorship, the blindness of the last-named authority seemed 
 to show the easiest way out of the difficulty. Joseph was 
 supposed to have dictated it to different disciples at different 
 periods, and somehow every one of the amanuenses infused 
 part of his own individuality into his share of the work. 
 Popular belief thus fastened upon this Joseph the Blind, 
 since a name the work must needs have, and to him in most 
 of the editions, the Targum is affiliated. Yet, if ever he 
 did translate the Hagiographa, certain it is that those which 
 we possess are not by his or his disciples' hands — that is, of 
 the time of the fourth century. Writers of the thirteenth 
 century already refuted this notion of Joseph's authorship, 
 for the assumption of which there never was any other 
 ground than that he was mentioned in the Talmud, like 
 Onkelos- Akylas and Jonathan, in connection with Targum ; 
 and, as we saw, there is indeed reason to believe that he had 
 a share in the redaction of " Jonathan " to the Prophets, 
 which falls in his time. Between him and our hagio- 
 graphical Targums, however, many centuries must have
 
 394 ON the takgums. 
 
 elapsed. Yet we do not even venture to assign to them 
 more than an approximate round date, about 1000 a.d. 
 Besides the Targums to the Pentateuch and the Prophets, 
 those now extant range over Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the five 
 Megilloth, i. e. Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Esther, 
 Ecclesiastes ; the Chronicles and Daniel. Ezra and Nehe- 
 iniah alone are left without a Targum at present ; yet we 
 can hardly help believing that ere long one will also bo 
 found to the latter, as the despaired-of Chronicles was found 
 in the seventeenth century, and Daniel — a sure trace of it at 
 least, so recently, that as yet nobody has considered it worth 
 his while to take any notice of it. We shall divide these 
 Targums into four groups : Proverbs, Job, Psalms ; — Megil- 
 loth ;— Chronicles ; — and Daniel. 
 
 1. Targum on Tsalms, Job, Proverbs. 
 
 Certain linguistic and other characteristics 1 exhibited by 
 these three Targums, lead to the conclusion that they are 
 nearly contemporaneous productions, and that their birth- 
 place is, most likely, Syria. While the two former, how- 
 ever, are mere paraphrases, the Targum on Proverbs comes 
 nearer to our idea of a version than almost any Targum, 
 except perhaps that of Onkelos. It adheres as closely to 
 the original text as possible. The most remarkable feature 
 about it, however, and one which has given rise to endless 
 speculations and discussions, is its extraordinary similarity 
 to the Syriac Version. It would indeed sometimes seem as 
 if they had copied each other — an opinion warmly advocated 
 by Dathe, who endeavoured to prove that the Chaldee had 
 copied or adapted the Syrian, there being passages in the 
 Targum which could, ho assumed, only be accounted for by 
 
 1 e. ;/. The use of the word *~>J3N 
 for angel in Targ. Ps. and Job, the 
 J, alllxed to the 3rd p. plur. praef. 
 
 Peal, the infiu. with prof. O, besides 
 
 several more or less unusual Greek and 
 Syriac words common to all three.
 
 OX THE TAEGUMS. 
 
 39; 
 
 a misunderstanding of the Syriac translation. 1 It has, on 
 the other hand, been argued that there are a greater number 
 of important passages which distinctly show that the Tar- 
 gumist had used an original Hebrew text, varying from that 
 of the Syriac, and had also made use of the LXX. against 
 the latter. 2 The Syriasms would easily be accounted for by 
 the Aramaic idiom itself, the forms of which vary but little 
 from, and easily merge into, the sister dialect of Syria. 
 Indeed nearly all of them are found in the Talmud, a 
 strictly Aramaic work. It has been supposed by others that 
 neither of these versions, as they are now in our hands, exhibit 
 their original form. A late editor, as it were, of the (muti- 
 lated) Targum, might have derived his emendations from 
 that version which came nearest to it, both in language and 
 in close adherence to the Hebrew text — viz., the Syriac ; 
 and there is certainly every reason to conclude from the 
 woefully faulty state in which this Targum is found (Luz- 
 zatto counts several hundred corrupt readings in it), that 
 many and clumsy hands must have been at work upon the 
 later Codices. The most likely solution of the difficulty, 
 however, seems to be that indicated by Frankel — viz., that 
 the LXX. is the common source of both versions, but in 
 such a manner that the Aramaic has also made use of the 
 Hebrew and the Greek — of the latter, however, through the 
 Syriac medium. As a specimen of the curious similarity 
 of both versions, the following two verses from the beginning 
 of the book may find a place here : — 
 
 1 e.g., ch. xxix. 5, tlie Heb. word rp"lp, 
 " a city," is rendered )*3l-2, " city," 
 in Syr. Targum translates N313, " a 
 lie," which is only to be accounted 
 for by a misunderstanding or mis- 
 reading of the Syriac )~2i-D, where 
 for the second c the Chaldee translator 
 read a h, JL^>«_3. 
 
 - Prov. xxvi. 10, the Masoretic text 
 reads: ^D3 "13B>1 *?3 ^>in» 31; 
 
 LXX. ttoWo, x 6 'M<*C 6Ta < cap| a<pp6vcov 
 (= ^D3 "IE>3); Targ. X1^3 6PT1 »JD 
 nS^DT; thus adopting exactly the 
 reading of the LXX. against the 
 received text : xxix. 21, "$30 plSID 
 H3y, quoted in the same manner in 
 Talm. Succah. 52 b ; LXX. ts Kara- 
 (nrara\S. £k ircuSbs oi/c<-'t7Jj ecrrai; evi- 
 dently ' reading TV>TY> 13V = Targ. 
 
 nn: X13y t ?. Comp. also xxvii. 16, 
 xxx. i'.O, &c.
 
 396 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 Chap. I. 2-3. 
 Targum (Ver. 2). 
 
 Ver. 3. 
 
 s^Di^n ^ma N^np^ 
 
 Syr. (Ver. 2). 
 Ver. 3. 
 
 JLo-^Lo JLl^jo ji.cua.j9 jo 
 
 Compare also vers, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13 ; cb. ii. vers. 9, 10, 
 13-15 ; iii. 2-9, &c. 
 
 We must not omit to observe that no early Jewish com- 
 mentator — Rashi, Ibn Ezra, &c. — mentions the Targum 
 either to Proverbs, or to Job and Psalms. Nathan ben 
 Jeehiel (twelfth century) is the first who quotes it. 
 
 Respecting the two latter Targum s of this group, Psalms 
 and Job, it is to be observed that they are, more or less, 
 mere collections of fragments. That there must have existed 
 paraphrases to Job at a very early period follows from the 
 Talmudical passages which we quoted in the introduction — 
 nay, we almost feel inclined to assume that this book, con- 
 sidered by the learned as a mere allegory (" Job never was, 
 and never was created," is the dictum found in the Talmud, 
 Baba Bathra, 15 a: i.e. he never had any real existence, but 
 is a poetical, though sacred, invention), opened the list of 
 written paraphrases. How much of the primitive version is 
 embodied in the one which we possess it is of course next to 
 impossible to determine, more especially in the state of 
 infancy in which the investigation of the Targums as yet 
 remains. So much, however, is palpable, that the Targums 

 
 OX THE TAEGUMS. 397 
 
 of both Psalms and Job in their present shape contain relics 
 of different authors in different times: some paraphrasts, 
 some strictly translators. Very frequently a second version 
 of the same passage is introduced by the formula -\n$ D^IjH, 
 " another Targum," and varies most widely from its prede- 
 cessor ; while, more especially in the Psalms, a long series 
 of chapters translated literally, is followed by another series 
 translated in the wildest and most fanciful character. The 
 Cod. Erpen. still exhibits these various readings, as such, 
 side by side, on its margin ; thence, however, they have in 
 our printed editions found their way into the text. How 
 much of these variants, or of the entire text, belongs to the 
 Palestinian Cycles, which may well have embraced the 
 whole Torah : — or whether they are to be considered ex- 
 clusively the growth of later times, and have thus but a very 
 slender connection with either the original Babylonian or 
 the Palestinian Targum- works, future investigation must 
 determine. 
 
 The most useful in this group is naturally the Targum on 
 Proverbs, it being the one which translates most closely, or 
 rather the only one which does translate at all. Besides the 
 explanation it gives of difficult passages in the text, its 
 peculiar affinity to the Syriac Version naturally throws some 
 light upon both, and allows of emendations in and through 
 either. As to Job and Psalms, their chief use lies in their 
 showing the gradual dying stages of the idiom in which 
 they are written, and also in their being in a manner guides 
 to the determination of the date of certain stages of Hao;- 
 gadah. 
 
 2, 3. Taegums on the Five Megilloth. 
 
 These Targums are likewise not mentioned before the 
 twelfth century, when the Aruch quotes them severally : — 
 although Esther must have been translated at a very early 
 period, since the Talmud already mentions a Targum on it. 
 Of this, we need hardly add, no trace is found in our present 
 Tarsum. The freedom of a " version " can go no further
 
 r.os 
 
 OX THE TARGUMS. 
 
 than it does in these Targums on the Megilloth. They are, 
 in fact, mere Haggadah, and bear the most striking resem- 
 blance to the Midrash on the respective books. Curiously 
 enough, the gradual preponderance of the Paraphrase over 
 the text is noticeable in the following order : Ruth, Lamen- 
 tations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Song of Songs. The latter is 
 fullest to overflowing of those " nugx, atque frivolitates" 
 which have so sorely tried the temper of the wise and grave. 
 Starting from the almost comical notion that all they found 
 in the books of Mohammedanism and of Judaism, of Rome 
 and of Greece, if it seemed to have any reference to " Re- 
 ligio," however unsupported, and however plainly bearing 
 the stamp of poetry — good or bad — on its face, must needs 
 be a religious creed, and the creed forced upon every single 
 believer : — they could not but get angry with mere " day- 
 dreams" being interspersed with the sacred literature of the 
 Bible. Delitzsch, a scholar of our generation, says of the 
 Targums in general that " history becomes in them most 
 charming, most instructive poetry ; but this poetry is not 
 the invention, the phantasma of the writer, but the old and 
 popular venerable tradition or legend .... the Targums 
 are poetical, both as to their contents and form " (Gesch. d. 
 Jud. Poesie, p. 27) : and further, " The wealth of legend in 
 its gushing fullness did not suffer any formal bounds ; legend 
 bursts upon legend, like wave upon wave, not to be dammed 
 in even by any poetical forms. Thus the Jerusalem Tar- 
 gum in its double Recensions [to the Pentateuch], and the 
 Targums on the five Megilloth are the most beautiful 
 national works of art, through which there runs the golden 
 thread of Scripture, and which are held together only by 
 the unity of the idea" (p. 135). Although we do not share 
 Delitzsch's enthusiasm to the full extent, yet we cannot but 
 aoree with him that there are, too:ether with stones and 
 <lust, many pearls of precious price to be gathered from 
 these much despised, because hardly known, books. 
 
 The dialect of these books occupies the mean between the 
 East and West Aramaean, and there is a certain unity of 
 style and design about all the five books, which fully justifies
 
 ON THE TAEGUMS. 399 
 
 the supposition that they are, one and all. the work of one 
 author. It may be that, taken in an inverted series, they 
 mark the successive stages of a poet's life ; glowing, rap- 
 turous, overflowing in the first ; stately, sober, prosy in the 
 last. As to the time of its writing or editing, we have again 
 to repeat, that it is most uncertain, but unquestionablv 
 belongs to a period much later than the Talmud. The 
 Book of Esther, enjoying both through its story-like form 
 and the early injunction of its being read or heard by every 
 one on the feast of Purim, a great circulation and popularity, 
 has been targumised many times, and besides the one em- 
 bodied in the five Megilloth, there are two more extant {not 
 three, as generally stated : the so-called third being only an 
 abbreviation of the first), which are called respectively the 
 first : a short one without digressions, and the second — 
 {Targum sheni) : a larger one, belonging to the Palestinian 
 Cycle. The latter Targum is a collection of Eastern ro- 
 mances, broken up and arranged to the single verses: of 
 gorgeous hues and extravagant imagination, such as are to 
 be met with in the Adshaib or Chamis, or any Eastern col- 
 lection of legends and tales. 
 
 VI. Targum on the Book of Chronicles. 
 
 This Targum was unknown, as we said before, up to a 
 very recent period. In 1680, it was edited for the first time 
 from an Erfurt MS. by M. F. Beck, and in 1715 from a 
 more complete as well as correct MS. at Cambridge, by 
 D. Wilkins. The name of Hungary occurring in it, and its 
 frequent use of the Jerusalem-Targum to the Pentateuch, 
 amounting sometimes to simple copying (comp. the Genealo- 
 gical Table in chap, i., &c), show sufficiently that its author 
 is neither "Jonathan b. Uzziel" nor "Joseph the Blind," as 
 has been suggested. But the language, style, and the 
 Haggadah with which it abounds, point to a late period 
 and to Palestine as the place where it was written. Its 
 use must be limited to philological, historical, and geo-
 
 400 
 
 OX THE TAEGiniK. 
 
 graphical studies; the science of exegesis will profit little 
 by it. The first edition appeared under the title Para- 
 phrasis Chcdclaica libr. Chronicorum, cura M. F. Beckii, 
 2 torn. Aug. Vind. 1680-83, 4to ; the second by D. Wilkins, 
 Parajoihrasis .... auctore B. Josejrfio, &c. Amst. 1715, 4to. 
 The first edition has the advantage of a large number of 
 very learned notes, the second that of a comparatively more 
 correct and complete text. 
 
 VII. The Taegum to Daniel. 
 
 It is for the first time that this Targum, for the non- 
 existence of which many and weighty reasons were given 
 (that the date of the Messiah's arrival was hidden in it, 
 among others), is here formally introduced into the regular 
 rank and file of Targums, although it has been known for 
 now more than five-and-twenty years. Munk found it, not 
 indeed in the Original Aramaic, but in what appears to him 
 to be an extract of it written iu Persian. The MS. (Anc. 
 Fond, No. 45, Imp. Library) is inscribed " History of 
 Daniel," and has retained only the first words of the 
 Original, which it translates likewise into Persian. This 
 language is then retained throughout. 
 
 After several legends known from other Targums, follows 
 a long prophecy of Daniel, from which the book is shown to 
 have been written after the first Crusade. Mohammed and 
 his successors are mentioned, also a king who coming from 
 Europe (]^^"n ?tf) will go to Damascus, and kill the Ish- 
 maelitic (Mohammedan) kings and princes; he will break 
 down the minarets (mR3ft)> destroy the mosques (NiTUDB), 
 and no one will after that dare to pronounce the name of 
 the Profane (^D3 = Mohammed). The Jews will also have 
 to suffer great misfortunes (as indeed the knightly Crusaders 
 won their spurs by dastardly murdering the helpless masses, 
 men, women, and children, iu the Ghettos along the Rhine 
 and elsewhere, before they started to deliver the Holy tomb). 
 By a sudden transition the Prophet then passes on to the 
 " Messiah, the Son of Joseph," Gog ancl Magog, and to the
 
 ON THE TAEGUMS. 401 
 
 " true Messiah, the Son of David." Munk rightly concludes 
 that the book must have been composed in the twelfth 
 century, when Christian kings reigned for a brief period 
 over Jerusalem {Notice sur Saadia, Par. 1838). 
 
 VIII. There is also a Chaldee translation extant of the 
 apocryphal pieces of Esther, which, entirely lying apart 
 from our task, we confine ourselves to mention without 
 further entering into the subject. De Rossi has published 
 them with Notes and Dissertations. Tubingen, 1783, 8vo. 
 
 Further Fragments of the Palestinian Targdm. 
 
 Besides the complete books belonging to the Palestinian 
 Cycle of Targum which we have mentioned, and the portions 
 of it intersected as " Another Reading," " Another Targum," 
 into the Babylonian Versions, there are extant several inde- 
 pendent fragments of it. Nor need we as yet despair of 
 finding still further portions, perhaps one day to see it 
 restored entirely. There is all the more hope for this, as 
 the Targum has not been lost very long yet. Abudraham 
 quotes the Targum Jerushalmi to Samuel (i. 9, 13). Kimchi 
 has preserved several passages from it to Judges (xi. 1, con- 
 sisting of 47 words) ; to Samuel (i. 17, 18 : 106 words) ; and 
 Kings (i. 22, 21 : GS words ; ii. 4, 1 : 174 words ; iv. 6 : 55 
 words ; iv. 7 : 72 words ; xiii. 21 : 9 words), under the 
 simple name of Toseftah, i.e. Addition, or Additional Tar- 
 gum. Luzzatto has also lately found fragments of the 
 same, under the names "Targum of Palestine," "Targum 
 of Jerushalmi," " Another Heading," &c, in an African 
 Codex written 5247 a.m. = 1487 a.d., viz. to 1 Sam. xviii. 
 19 ; 2 Sam. xii. 12 ; 1 Kings v. 9, v. 11, v. 13, x. 18, x. 2G, 
 :xiv. 13 ; to Hosea i. 1 ; Obad. i. 1. — To Isaiah, Rashi 
 (Isaaki, not as people still persist in calling him, Jarchi), 
 Abudraham and Farissol quote it : and a fragment of the 
 Targum to this prophet is extant in Cod. Urbin. Vatican 
 No. 1, containing about 120 words, and beginning: "Pro- 
 phecy of Isaiah, which he prophesied at the end of his 
 
 2 D
 
 402 ON THE TARGUMS. 
 
 prophecy in the days of Manasseh the Son of Hezekiah the 
 Kin » of the Tribe of the House of Judah on the 17th of 
 Tamuz in the hour when Manasseh set up an idol in the 
 Temple," &c. Isaiah predicts in this his own violent death. 
 Parts of this Targum are also found in Hebrew, in Pesiktah 
 Kabbathi G a, and Yalkut Isa. 58 d. A Jerusalem Targum 
 to Jeremiah is mentioned by Kimchi ; to Ezekiel by P. 
 Simeon, Nathan (Aruch), and likewise by Kimchi, who also 
 speaks of a farther additional Targum to Jonathan for this 
 Book. A " Targum-Jerushalmi " to Micah is known to 
 Rashi, and of Zechariah a fragment has been published in 
 Brims (Kepert. pt. 15, p. 174) from a Reuchlinian MS. (Cod. 
 354, Kennic. 25), written HOG. The passage, found as a 
 marginal adoss to Zech. xii. 10, reads as follows : — 
 
 " Targum Jerushalmi. And I shall pour out upon the- 
 House of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit 
 of prophecy and of prayer for truth. And after this shall 
 go forth Messiah the Son of Efraim to wage war against 
 Gog. And Gog will kill him before the city of Jerushalaim. 
 They will look up to me and they will ask me wherefore the 
 heathens have killed Messiah the Son of Efraim. They will 
 then mourn over him as mourn lather and mother over an 
 only son, and they will wail over him as one wails over a 
 firstborn." — A Targum Jerushalmi to the third chapter 
 of HabakJcuh, quoted by Kashi, is mentioned by de Kossi 
 (Cod. 265 and 405, both thirteenth century). It has been 
 suggested that a Targum Jerushalmi on the Prophets only 
 existed to the Haftarahs, which had at one time been trans- 
 lated perhaps, like the portion from the Law r , in public ; 
 but we have seen that entire books, not to mention single 
 chapters, possessed a Palestinian Targum, which never were 
 intended or used, for the purpose of Haftarah. And there is 
 no reason to doubt that the origin of this Targum to the 
 Prophets is precisely similar to, and perhaps contempo- 
 raneous with, that Avhich we traced to that portion which 
 embraces the Pentateuch. The Babylonian Version, the 
 " Jonathan " Targum, though paraphrastic, did not satisfy 
 the apparently more imaginative Palestinian public. Thus
 
 OX THE TAKGUMS. 403 
 
 from lieaped-up additions and marginal glosses, the step to 
 a total re-writing of the entire Codex in the manner and 
 taste of the later times and the different locality, was easy 
 enough. From a critique of the work as such, however, we 
 must naturally keep aloof, as long as we have only the few 
 specimens named to judge from. But its general spirit and 
 tendency are clear enough. So is also the advantage to 
 which even the minimum that has survived may some day 
 be put by the student of Midrashic literature, as we have 
 briefly indicated above. 
 
 We cannot conclude without expressing the hope — j) ro " 
 bably a vain one — that linguistic studies may soon turn in 
 the direction of that vast and most interesting, as well as 
 important, Aramaic literature, of which the Targums form 
 but a small item. 
 
 The writer finally begs to observe that the translations of 
 all the passages quoted from Talmud and Midrash, as well 
 as the specimens from the Targum, have been made by him 
 directly from the respective originals. 
 
 2 d 2
 
 ( 404 ) 
 
 XVI. 
 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 The Samaritan Pentateuch, a Recension of the commonly 
 received Hebrew Text of the Mosaic Law, in use with the 
 Samaritans, was written in the ancient Hebrew (Ibri), or so- 
 called Samaritan character. 2 This recension is found vaguely 
 quoted by some of the early Fathers of the Church, under 
 the name of " Uakaiorarov 'Eiftpai/cbv to irapa —a/xapeirai';," 
 in contradistinction to the "'Eftpa'iicbv to irapa 'lovSaiois;" 
 further, as " Samaritanorum Volumina," cv;c. Thus Origen 
 on Num. xiii. 1, .... "a teal avra e/c tovtcov —afxapeiTcou 
 'Efipaiicov fierefiaXopev ;" and on Num. xxi. 13, . . . " a iv 
 p.6voi<; roiv 'Eap.apetroiv evpop-ev," &c. Jerome, Prol. to 
 Kings : " Samaritan! etiam Pentateuchum Moysis totidem " 
 (? 22, like the " Hebrews, Syrians and Chaldseans") "litteris 
 habent, figuris tantum et apicibus discrepantes." Also on 
 Gal. iii. 10, "quam ob causam" — (viz. , JLirLKaTcipaTO<; 7ra? 
 o? ovk ifip,evei ev iraai tols ryeypafifMevois, being quoted there 
 from Deut. xxvii. 26, where the Masoretic text has only Tntf 
 J"1NTn mi/in mi J~IN □V > **b "WN— " cursed be he that eon- 
 firmeth not 3 the words of this Law to do them;" while the 
 LXX. reads iras dv6p(oiro<i . . . iracri to?? A.6701?) — " quam 
 ob causam Samaritanorum Hebrasa volumina relegens inveni 
 ^3 scriptum esse;" and he forthwith charges the Jews with 
 having deliberately taken out the ^ , because they did not 
 
 1 From Dr. Wm. Smith's 'Die- Tosifta Synh. 4 ; Synhedr. 22 a, Meg. 
 tionary of the Bible,' Vol. II. Jer. 1, 9, Sola Jer. 7, 2, sq. 
 
 2 rmab, rcn, nnay nns, as .lis- ■ The a. v., following the lxx., 
 
 tinguiBhed fromfcOty, nnwm 2m. and perhaps Luther, has inserted the 
 
 Comp. Synh. 21 b, Jer. Meg. 5, 2; word all.
 
 OX THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 405 
 
 wish to be bound individually to all the ordinances : for- 
 a'ettino: at the same time that this same b"2 occurs in the 
 very next chapter of the Masoretic text (Deut. xxviii. 15) : — ■ 
 " All his commandments and his statutes." Eusebius of 
 Ca3sarea observes that the LXX. and the Sam. Pent, agree 
 against the Keceived Text in the number of years from the 
 Deluge to Abraham. Cyril of Alexandria speaks of certain 
 words (C4en. iv. 8), wanting in the Hebrew, but found in the 
 Samaritan. The same remark is made by Procopius of Gaza 
 with respect to Deut, i. 6 ; Num. x. 10, x. 9, &c. Other pas- 
 sages are noticed by Diodorus, the Greek Scholiast, &c. The 
 Talmud, on the other hand, mentions the Sam. Pent, dis- 
 tinctly and contemptuously as a clumsily forged record : 
 " You have falsified 1 your Pentateuch," said E. Eliezer b. 
 Shimon to the Samaritan scribes, with reference to a passage 
 in Deut. xi. 30, where the well-understood word Shechem 
 was gratuitously inserted after " the plains of Moreh," — " and 
 you have not profited aught by it " (comp. Jer. Sotah 21 b, 
 cf. 17 ; Babli 33 b). On another occasion they are ridiculed 
 on account of their ignorance of one of the simplest rules of 
 Hebrew grammar, displayed in their Pentateuch; viz. the 
 use of the n locale (unknown, however, according to Jer. 
 Meg. 6, 2, also to the people of Jerusalem). " Who has caused 
 you to blunder?" said E. Shimon b. Eliezer to them ; referring 
 to their abolition of the Mosaic ordinance of marrying the 
 deceased brother's wife (Deut. xxv. 5 ff.) ,— through a mis- 
 interpretation of the passage in question, which enjoins that 
 the wife of the dead man shall not be " without " to a stranger, 
 but that the brother should marry her : they, however, taking 
 TTPnn ( = yinV) to be an epithet of nwN, " wife," translated 
 " the outer wife," i. e. the betrothed only (Jer. Jebam. 3, 2, 
 Ber. R., &c). 
 
 Down to within the last two hundred and fifty years, how- 
 ever, no copy of this divergent Code of Laws had reached 
 Europe, and it began to be pronounced a fiction, and the 
 plain words of the Church-Fathers— the better known autho-
 
 406 ON THE SAMABITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 rities — who quoted it, were subjected to subtle interpretations. 
 Suddenly, in 1016, Pietro della Vallc, one of the first dis- 
 coverers also of the Cuneiform inscriptions, acquired a com- 
 plete Codex from the Samaritans in Damascus. In 1623 it 
 was presented by Achille Harley de Sancy to the Library of 
 the Oratory in Paris, and in 1628 there appeared a brief 
 description of it by J. Morinus in his preface to the Roman 
 text of the LXX. Three years later, shortly before it was 
 published in the Paris Polyglott, — whence it was copied, 
 with few emendations from other codices, by Walton — 
 Morinus, the first editor, wrote his Exercitationes Ecclesiastics' 
 in utrumque Samaritanorum Pentateuchum, in which he pro- 
 nounced the newly found Codex, with all its innumerable 
 Variants from the Masoretic text, to be infinitely superior to 
 the latter : in fact, the unconditional and speedy emendation 
 of the Received Text thereby was urged most authoritatively. 
 And now the impulse was given to one of the fiercest and 
 most barren literary and theological controversies : of which 
 more anon. Between 1620 and 1630 six additional copies, 
 partly complete, partly incomplete, were acquired by Ussher : 
 five of which he deposited in English libraries, while one 
 was sent to De Dieu, and has disappeared mysteriously. 
 Another Codex, now in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, 
 was brought to Italy in 1621. Peiresc procured two more, 
 one of which was placed in the Royal Library of Paris, and 
 <me in the Barberini at Rome. Thus the number of MSS. 
 in Europe gradually grew to sixteen. During the present 
 century another, but very fragmentary copy, was acquired 
 by the Gotha Library. A copy of the entire (?) Pentateuch, 
 with Targum (? Sam. Version), in parallel columns, 4to, on 
 parchment, was brought from Ndblus by Mr. Grove in 1861, 
 for the Count of Paris, in whose library it is. Single portions 
 of the Sam. Pent., in a more or less defective state, are now 
 of no rare occurrence in Europe. 
 
 Respecting the external condition of these MSS., it may 
 be observed that their sizes vary from 12mo to folio, and 
 that no scroll, such as the Jews and the Samaritans use in 
 their synagogues, is to be found among them. Tbe letters,
 
 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 407 
 
 •which are of a size corresponding to that of the book, exhibit 
 none of those varieties of shape so frequent in the Masor. 
 Text ; such as majuscules, minuscules, suspended, inverted 
 letters, &c. Their material is vellum or cotton-paper; the 
 ink used is black in all cases save the scroll used by the 
 Samaritans at Nablus, the letters of which are in gold. 
 There are neither vowels, accents, nor diacritical points. 
 The individual words are separated from each other by a 
 dot. Greater or smaller divisions of the text are marked 
 by two dots placed one above the other, and by an asterisk. 
 A small line above a consonant indicates a peculiar meaning 
 of the word, an unusual form, a passive, and the like : it is, 
 in fact, a contrivance to bespeak attention. 1 The whole 
 Pentateuch is divided into nine hundred and sixty-four para- 
 graphs, or Kazzin, the termination of which is indicated by 
 these figures, = .*. or <. At the end. of each book the 
 number of its divisions is stated thus :— 
 
 <25o) 2) n^nNO pvp : pfc^an idd nrn [Masoret 
 
 (200) DM1NO .. *3B>n .. C 
 
 Cod. 
 
 12 
 
 11 
 
 Sidras 
 
 (Pars 
 
 hiotta), 50 Chapters] 
 40 ., ] 
 
 (130) uwhw hkd .. »B»i?e>n .. 
 (2i«) rm-n .. Tain * 
 (ioo) iDi - p .. »K»»nn » 
 
 
 
 
 10 
 10 
 11 
 
 " 
 
 
 27 „] 
 36 „ ] 
 
 34 , ] 
 
 The Sam. Pentateuch is 
 
 halved 
 
 in 
 
 Lev. 
 
 vii. 
 
 15 
 
 (viii. 8, in 
 
 Hebrew Text), where the words "Middle of the Thorah" 2 
 are found. At the end of each MS. the year of the copying, 
 the name of the scribe, and also that of the proprietor, are 
 usually stated. Yet their dates are not always trustworthy 
 when given, and very difficult to be conjectured when entirely 
 omitted, since the Samaritan letters afford no internal evi- 
 dence of the period in which they were written. To none of 
 the MSS., however, which have as yet reached Europe, can 
 be assigned a higher date than the 10th Christian century. 
 The scroll used in Nablus bears — so the Samaritans pretend — 
 the following inscription : — " I, Abisha, son of Pinehas, son 
 of Eleazar, son of Aaron the Priest, — upon them be the 
 
 1 njn and nzn, ny and -jy, -nn 
 
 and nnn. ^>N and ^tf, fetf and ^3N\ 
 iTlj^ and inp\ V and b, the suffixes 
 
 at the end of a word, the H without 
 a dagesh, &c, are thus pointed out to 
 the reader. 
 
 ; xninnxn &uba.
 
 408 
 
 OX THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 Grace of Jehovah ! To His honour have I written 'this Holy 
 Law at the entrance of the Tabernacle of Testimony on the 
 Mount Gerizim, Beth El, in the thirteenth year of the taking 
 possession of the Land of Canaan, and all its boundaries 
 around it, by the Children of Israel. I praise Jehovah.'' 
 (Letter of Meshalmah b. Ab Sechuah, Cod. 19,791, Add. 
 MSS. Brit. Mus. Comp. Epist. Sam. Sichemitarum act Johum 
 Ludol-phum, Ciza>, 1088 ; Antiq. Eccl. Orient, p. 123 ; Hunt- 
 ingtoni Epist. pp. 49, 50 ; Eichhorn's Repertorium f. bill, unci 
 morg. Lit., torn, ix., &c.) But no European 1 has ever suc- 
 ceeded in finding it in this scroll, however great the pains 
 bestowed upon the search (coinp. Eichhorn, Einleit. ii. 132) ; 
 and even if it had been found, it would not have deserved the 
 slightest credence. 
 
 We have briefly stated above that the Exercitationes of 
 Morinus, which placed the Samaritan Pentateuch far above 
 the lleceived Text in point of genuineness, — partly on 
 account of its agreeing in many places with the Septuagint, 
 and partly on account of its superior " lucidity and harmony," 
 — excited and kept up for nearly two hundred years one of 
 the most extraordinary controversies on record. Charac- 
 teristically enough, however, this was set at rest once for all 
 by the very first systematic investigation of the point at 
 issue. It would now appear as if the unquestioning rapture 
 with which every new literary discovery was formerly hailed, 
 the innate animosity against the Masoretic (Jewish) Text, 
 the general preference for the LXX., the defective state of 
 Semitic studies, — as if, we say, all these put together were 
 not sufficient to account for the phenomenon that men of any 
 critical acumen could for one moment not only place the 
 
 1 It would appear, however (see 
 Archdeacon Tat tarn's notice in the 
 Parthenon, No. 4, May 24, ISG'2) that 
 Mr. Levysohn, a person lately attached 
 to the liussiaii staff in Jerusalem, has 
 found the inscription in question 
 " going through the middle of the body 
 of the Text of the Decalogue, ami 
 extending through three columns." 
 Considering that the Samaritans them- 
 
 selves told Huntington, "that this in- 
 scription had been in their scroll once, 
 but, must have been erased by some 
 wicked hand," this startling piece of 
 information must be received with 
 extreme caution : — no less so than the 
 other more or less vague statements 
 with respect to the labours and pre- 
 tended discoveries of Mr. Levysohn. 
 See note. p. 42G.
 
 OX THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 409 
 
 Sam. Pent, on a par with the Masoretic Text, but even raise 
 it, unconditionally, far above it. There was indeed another 
 cause at work, especially in the first period of the dispute : 
 it was a controversial spirit which prompted Morinus and 
 his followers, Cappellus and others, to prove to the Reformers- 
 what kind of value was to be attached to their authority : 
 the received form of the Bible, upon which and which alone 
 they professed to take their stand ; — -it was now evident that 
 nothing short of the Divine Spirit, under the influence and 
 inspiration of which the Scriptures were interpreted and 
 expounded by the Roman Church, could be relied upon. On 
 the other hand, most of the " Antimorinians" — Ue Muys, 
 Huttinger, St. Morinus, Buxtorf, Fuller, Leusden, Pfeiffer, 
 &c. — instead of patiently and critically examining the sub- 
 ject and refuting their adversaries by arguments which were 
 within their reach, as they are within ours, directed their 
 attacks against the persons of the Mcrinians, and thus their 
 misguided zeal left the question of the superiority of the New 
 Document over the Old where they found it. Of higher 
 value were, it is true, the labours of Simon, Le Clerc, Walton, 
 &c, at a later period, who proceeded eclectic-ally, rejecting 
 many readings, and adopting others which seemed preferable 
 to those of the Old Text. Houbigant, however, with unex- 
 ampled ignorance and obstinacy, returned to Morinus's first 
 notion — already generally abandoned — of the unquestionable 
 and thorough superiority. He, again, was followed more or 
 less closely by Kennicott, Al. a St. Aqnilino, Lobstein, 
 Geddes, and others. The discussion was taken up once more 
 on the other side, chiefly by Ravins, who succeeded in finally 
 disposing of this point of the superiority (Exercitt. Phil, in 
 Houbig. Prol. Lugd. Bat. 1755). It was from his day for- 
 ward allowed, almost on all hands, that the Masoretic Text 
 was the genuine one, but that in doubtful cases, when the 
 Samaritan had an " unquestionably clearer " reading, this 
 was to be adopted, since a certain amount of value, however 
 limited, did attach to it. Michaelis, Eichhom, Bertholdt, 
 Jalm, and the majority of modern critics, adhered to this 
 opinion. Here the matter rested until 1815, when Gestnius
 
 410 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 {Be Pent. Sam. Origine, Indole et Auctoritate) abolished the 
 remnant of the authority of the Sam. Pent. So masterly, 
 lucid, and clear are his arguments and his proofs, that there 
 has been and will be no further question as to the absence of 
 all value in this Recension, and in its pretended emendations. 
 In fact, a glance at the systematic arrangement of the 
 variants, of which he first of all bethought himself, is quite 
 sufficient to convince the reader at once that they are for the 
 most part mere blunders, arising from an imperfect know- 
 ledge of the first elements of grammar and exegesis ; and that 
 others owe their existence to a studied design of conforming 
 certain passages to the Samaritan mode of thought, speech* 
 and faith — more especially to show that the Mount Gerizim, 
 upon which their temple stood, was the spot chosen and 
 indicated by God to Moses as the one upon which He desired 
 to be worshipped. 1 Finally, that others are due to a tendency 
 towards removing, as well as linguistic shortcomings would 
 allow, all that seemed obscure or in any way doubtful, and 
 towards filling up all apparent imperfections: — either by 
 repetitions or by means of newly-invented and badly-fitting 
 words and phrases. It must, however, be premised that, 
 except two alterations (Ex. xiii. 7, where the Sam. reads 
 " Six days shalt thou eat unleavened bread," instead of the 
 received " Seven days," and the change of the word ppim? 
 " There shall not he," into n TITI, " live" Deut. xxiii. 18), the 
 Mosaic laws and ordinances themselves are nowhere tampered 
 Avith. 
 
 We will now proceed to lay specimens of these once so 
 highly prized variants before the reader, in order that he 
 may judge for himself. We shall follow in this the commonly 
 received arrangement of Gesenius, who divides all these 
 readings into eight classes ; to which, as we shall afterwards 
 show, Frankel has suggested the addition of two or three 
 others, while Kirchheim (in his Hebrew work ]l"OV# VOID) 
 enumerates thirteen, 2 which we will name hereafter. 
 
 1 For "im\ " He mil elect " (the spot), the Sam. always puts "IPD, " He 
 has elected" (viz. Gerizim). Sec below. 
 - D ,_ iyt:' "2,1 must be a mispriut.
 
 ON THE SAMARITAN TENTATEUCH. 
 
 411 
 
 1. The first class, then, consists of readings by which 
 emendations of a grammatical nature have been attempted. 
 
 (a.) The quiescent letters, or so-called matres ledionis, are 
 supplied. 1 
 
 (&.) The more poetical forms of the pronouns, probably less 
 known to the Sam., are altered into the more common ones. 2 
 
 (c.) The same propensity for completing apparently incom- 
 plete forms is noticeable in the flexion of the verbs. The 
 apocopated or short future is altered into the regular future. 3 
 
 (d.) On the other hand the paragogical letters i and i 
 at the end of nouns, are almost universally struck out by the 
 Sam. corrector ; 4 and, in the ignorance of the existence of 
 nouns of a common gender, he has given them genders 
 according to his fancy. 5 
 
 (e.) The infin. absol. is, in the quaintest manner possible, 
 reduced to the form of the finite verb. 6 
 
 For obsolete or rare forms, the modern and more common 
 ones have been substituted i\\ a great number of places. 7 
 
 1 Thus D" 1 is found iu the Saroar. for 
 
 Ch of the Masoretic T. ; HI for IT- ; 
 
 V for 1-; Dil^X for Urbii; niTlKO 
 
 for rp'XO, &c. ; sometimes a 1 is put 
 oven where the Heb. T. has, in accord- 
 ance with the grammatical rules, only 
 a short vowel or a sheva :— VJSin is 
 found for V3pn ; rVPJlN for DV3K. 
 
 - WW, DH, Vxn, become UIT3K, 
 
 nan, nbxn. 
 
 3 IJfn becomes Yjni i n»^ is 
 emendated into niE'l ! XT (verb D"?) 
 into r\iXf; the final J —of the 3rd 
 pers. fern. plur. fut. into H3. 
 
 4 »13NJ> is shortened into piL", WH 
 
 into rvn. 
 
 5 Masculine are made the words 
 Qrb (Gen. xlix. 20), tjflp (Dent. xv. 7, 
 &c.), i"l3i"lD (Gen. xxxii. 9); feminine 
 the words ]'~)X (Gen. xiii. 6), "]V1 
 (Deut. xxviii. 25), K'fl3 (Gen. xlvi. 25, 
 &c. ) ; wherever the word "073 occurs 
 in the sense of " girl," a H is added at 
 the end (Gen. xxiv. 14, &c). 
 
 6 men ybn nw), "the waters 
 
 returned continually" is transformed 
 
 into 13-*1 )lbn ni"""l, '• they re- 
 turned, they went and they returned " 
 (Gen. viii. 3). Where the infin. is 
 used as an adverb, e.g. pmn (Gen. 
 xxi. lti), " lar off," it is altered into 
 np'mn, ''she went far away," which 
 renders the passage almost unintel- 
 ligible. 
 
 7 Dny for DTJ? (Gen. iii. 10, 11) ; 
 lb 11 for lb) fxi. 30) ; DniSX for the 
 collective "11S3X (xv. 10); niOK, "fe- 
 male servants," for mnON (xx. 18); 
 miD:*3 iiniJO fcTM for the adverbial 
 310 (xlix. 15); WO for DWQ (Ex. 
 xxyi. 26, making it depend from ^J?) ; 
 Dl^D, in the unusual sense of " from 
 it " (comp. 1 K. xvii. 13), is altered 
 iuto riSOp (Lev. ii. 2) ; ilTl is wrongly 
 
 put for Tl (3rd p. s. m. of ^n = ^s»' ■ 
 
 1JJ, the obsolete form, is replaced by 
 the more recent "VJ7 (Num. xxi. 15) ; 
 the unusual fern, termination *- (comp. 
 bwiH !?W3N) is elongated into IV- ; 
 inty is the emendation for vb' (Deut. 
 xxii. 1) ; ^n for *TV1 (Deut. xxxiii. 
 15, &c.)
 
 412 
 
 OX THE SAMAKITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 2. The second class of variants consists of glosses and inter- 
 pretations received into the text: glosses, moreover, in 
 which the Sam. not imfrequently coincides with the LXX., 
 and which are in many cases evidently derived by both from 
 some ancient Targnm. 1 
 
 3. The third class exhibits conjectural emendations — some- 
 times far from happy — of real or imaginary difficulties in the 
 Masoretic text." 
 
 1 P.'J'XI L'^X, " man and woman," 
 used" by Gen. vii. 2, of animals, is 
 changed into mp31 ~>3T, "male and 
 female ;" VWJ' (Gen. xxiv. 00), " his 
 haters," becomes WW, "his ene- 
 mies;" for HO (indefin.) is substituted 
 ilDIXD; KT, ' ; he will see, choose," 
 is amplified by a \b, "for himself;" 
 "13 H "13 H is transformed into "13 n 
 
 ~\W l&H (Lev. xvii. 10) ; 'rfPK "Ij^l 
 
 Sybl ba. (Num. xxiii. 4\ "And God 
 met Bilcain," becomes with the Sam. 
 
 '2 HN 6"N ybl2 NXO^, "And an 
 Angel of the Lord found Bileam;" 
 n'J'Kn hi! (Gen. xx. 3), "for the wo- 
 man," is amplified into miN by 
 nL"Nn, " for Hie sake of the woman:" 
 for H3371, from "133 (obsol., comp. 
 j£j\ is put HJ37, "those that are 
 before me," in contradistinction to 
 "those who will come after me; 
 ~>ypl1, " and she emptied" (her pitcher 
 into the trough, Gen. xxiv. 20), has 
 made mom for TTini, " and she took 
 down;" nil" *mj?13, "I will meet 
 there" (A. V., Kx. xxix. 4">), is made 
 CL" 'nC'Vn, "I shall be [searched] 
 found there;" Num. xxxi. 15, before 
 words mp3 bl DJVTin, " Have you 
 spared the life of every female?" a 
 nzb, "Why." is inserted (LNN.); 
 for K"lpK niiT DC ij (Dent, xxxii. 3), 
 " if I call the name of Jehovah," the 
 Sam. lias CL"3, " In the Dame," &c. 
 
 - The elliptic use of "P\ frequent 
 both in Hebrew and Arabic, being 
 evidently unknown to the emendator, 
 
 he alters the "bv PUP HNS pbn 
 (Gen. xvii. 17), "shall a child be born 
 unto him that is a hundred vears old?" 
 
 into T^IN, "shall I beget?" Gen. 
 xxiv. (32, N13D N3, "he came from 
 going" (A. V. "from the way") to 
 the well of Lahai-roi, the Sam. alters 
 into "G*102 K3, "in or through the 
 desert " (LNX., Sio ttjs ip-ofj.ov). In 
 
 Gen. xxx. 34, y~\2TD »JV I 1 ? ft, "Be- 
 hold, may it be according to thy 
 word,' the r? (Arab. A) is trans- 
 formed into fcO, "and if not — let it 
 be like thy word." Gen. xli. 32, 
 
 DlSm nUCTl b]}), "And for that 
 the dream was doubled," becomes 
 
 'n n»3B> rhy), "The dream rose a 
 second time," which is both mi- 
 Hebrew, and diametrically opposed t<> 
 the sense and construction of the 
 passage. Better is the emendation 
 
 Gen. xlix. 10, V^T J^B "from be- 
 tween his feet," into "from among his 
 
 banners," vbil P2». Ex. xv. 18, 
 all but five of the Sam. Codd. read 
 
 IWl D?1y?, "for ever and longer," in- 
 stead of "iyi, the common form, " ever- 
 more." Ex. xxxiv. 7, J"lj33? N7 npyi, 
 "that will by no means clear ///«• 
 sin" becomes T\p}\ V ilpjl, and the 
 innocent to him shall be innocent," 
 against both the parallel passages and 
 the obvious sense. The somewhat 
 difficult 1BD* t6), " and they did not 
 cease " (A. V., Num. xi. 25), reappears 
 as a still more obscure conjectural 
 ■1EpX\ which we would venture to 
 translate, "they were not gathered 
 in," in the sense of " killed : " instead 
 of either the 1B03K, "congregated,"' 
 of the Sam. Vers., or Castell's " conti- 
 nuerunt," or Houbigant's and Dathe's
 
 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 413 
 
 4. The fourth class exhibits readings in which apparent 
 deficiencies have been corrected or supplied from parallel 
 passages in the common text. Gen. xviii. 29, 30, for " I 
 shall not do it," * " I shall not destroy " 2 is substituted from 
 Gen. xviii. 28, 31, 32. Gen. xxxvii. 4, ViTN, '' his brethren," 
 is replaced by yjl, " his sons," from the former verse. One 
 of the most curious specimens of the endeavours of the 
 Samaritan Codex to render the readings as smooth and 
 consistent as possible, is its uniform spelling of proper nouns 
 like TUT, Jethro, occasionally spelt -)jy in the Hebrew 
 text, Moses' father-in-law — a man who, according to the 
 Midrash (Sifri), had no less than seven names ; yzoPP 
 (Jehoshua), into which form it corrects the shorter yi^n 
 (Hoshea) when it occurs in the Masoretic Codex. More 
 frequent still are the additions of single words and short 
 phrases inserted from parallel passages, where the Hebrew 
 text appeared too concise : 3 — unnecessary, often excessively 
 absurd interpolations. 
 
 u convenerant." Num. xxi. 28, the 
 *")}?, " Ar " (Moab), is emendated into 
 *iy, " as far as," a perfectly meaning- 
 less reading; only that the "li?, "city," 
 as we saw above, was a word unknown 
 to the Sam. The somewhat un- 
 common words (Num. xi. 32), lntSC'l 
 
 m)X> D!"6, "and they (the people) 
 spread them all abroad," are trans- 
 posed into r\\y\rw crb hmib^i, " and 
 
 they slaughtered for themselves a 
 slaughter." Deut. xxviii. 37, the 
 
 word nftu-v, " an astonishment " 
 (A. V.), very rarely used in this sense 
 (Jer. xix. 8, xxv. 9), becomes DDv 
 " to a name," /'. e., a bad name. Deut. 
 xxxiii. 6, 1DDD VnO TIM, " May his 
 men be a multitude," the Sam., with 
 its characteristic aversion to, or rather 
 ignorance of, the use of poetical 
 diction, reads "I3DO WKO \T1, "May 
 there be from him a multitude," i 
 thereby trying perhaps to encounter 
 also the apparent difficulty of the 
 word "1BDD, standing for " a great 
 number." Anything more absurd 
 than the )T\tV2 in this place could 
 
 hardly be imagined. A few verses 
 further on, the uncommon use of }£> in 
 the phrase j-ID-lp* |D (Deut. xxxiii. 11), 
 as " lest," " not," caused the no less 
 unfortunate alteration •13D , jp? ""O, so 
 that the latter part of the passage, 
 " smite through the loins of them that 
 rise against him, and of them lhat 
 hate him, tJtat tliey rise not again," be- 
 comes " irlw xoill raise them ? " — barren 
 alike of meaning and of poetry. For 
 the unusual and poetical ^NZH (^Deut. 
 xxxiii. 25 ; A. V. " thy 'strength"), 
 T2" is suggested ; a word about the 
 significance of which the commentators 
 are at a greater loss even than about 
 that of the original. 
 
 1 ni"i?N vb. -- rrntrx ab. 
 
 3 Thus in Gen. i. 14, the words 
 
 pKil hy Vxrk, " to give light upon 
 the earth," are inserted from ver. 17 ; 
 
 Gen. xi. 8, the word ^JE-l, " and a 
 tower," is added from ver. 4 ; Gen. 
 
 xxiv. 22, riSM by, "on her face" 
 (nose), is added from ver. 47, so that 
 the former verse reads " And the man 
 took (npn for DB>n) a golden ring 
 ' upon her face.' "
 
 414 OX THE SAMABITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 5. The fifth class is an extension of the one immediately 
 preceding;, and comprises larger phrases, additions, and 
 repetitions from parallel passages. Whenever anything is 
 mentioned as having been done or said previously by Moses, 
 or 'where a command of God is related as being executed, 
 the whole speech bearing upon it is repeated again at 
 full length. These tedious and always superfluous repeti- 
 tions are most frequent in Exodus, both in the record of the 
 plagues and in the many interpolations from Deuteronomy. 
 
 6. To the sixth class belong those " emendations " of 
 passages and words of the Hebrew text which contain some- 
 thing objectionable in the eyes of the Samaritans, on account 
 either of historical improbability or apparent want of dignity 
 in the terms applied to the Creator. Thus in the Sam. 
 Pent, no one, in the antediluvian times, begets his first son 
 after he has lived 150 years : but one hundred years are, 
 where necessary, subtracted before, and added after the 
 birth of the first son. Thus Jared, according to the Hebrew 
 Text, begot at 162 years, lived afterwards 800 years, and "all 
 his years were 962 years ;" according to the Sam. he begot 
 when only 62 years old, lived afterwards 785 years, " and all 
 his years were 847." After the Deluge the opposite method 
 is followed. A hundred or fifty years are added before and 
 subtracted after the begetting : K g. Arphaxad, who in the 
 Common Text is 35 years old when he begets Shelah, 
 and lived afterwards 403 years: in all 438 — is by the Sam. 
 made 135 years old when he begets Shelah, and lives only 
 303 years afterwards = 438. (The LXX. has, according to 
 its own peculiar psychological and chronological notions, 
 altered the Text in the opposite manner.) An exceedingly 
 important and often discussed emendation of this class is 
 the passage in Ex. xii. 40, which in our text reads, " Now 
 the sojourning of the children of Israel who dwelt in 
 Egypt was four hundred and thirty years." The Sama- 
 ritan (supported by LXX. Cod. Al.) has "The sojourn- 
 ing of the children of Israel, [and their fathers ivho dwelt in 
 the land of Canaan and in the land of Egypt — iv jf] Aljinrrfp 
 koI iv <yr} Kavadv] was four hundred and thirty years :" an
 
 OX THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 415 
 
 interpolation of very late date indeed. Again, in Gen. ii. 2, 
 " And God [? had] finished (by\, ? pluperf.) on the seventh 
 day," ^2v^n is altered into '•l^n, "the sixth," lest God's 
 rest on the Sabbath-day might seem incomplete (LXX.). In 
 Gen. xxix. 3, 8, " We cannot, until all the flocks be gathered 
 together, and till they roll the stone from the month of the 
 well," DHiy, "flocks," is replaced by D^11> "shepherds," 
 since the flocks could not roll the stone from the well : the 
 corrector not being apparently aware that in common par- 
 lance in Hebrew, as in other languages, " they " occasionally 
 refer to certain not particularly specified persons. Well may 
 Gesenius ask what this corrector would have made of 
 Is. xxxvii. [not xxxvi.] 36 : " And when they arose in the 
 morning, behold they were all dead corpses." The surpass- 
 ing reverence of the Samaritan is shown in passages like Ex. 
 xxiv. 10, "and they beheld God," 1 which is transmuted into 
 "and they held by, clung to God" 2 — a reading certainly less 
 in harmony with the following — " and they ate and drank." 
 
 7. The seventh class comprises what we might briefly call 
 Samaritanisms, i.e., certain Hebrew forms, translated into 
 the idiomatic Samaritan ; and here the Sam. Codices vary 
 considerably among themselves, — as far as the very imperfect 
 collation of them has hitherto shown — some having retained 
 the Hebrew in many places where the others have adopted 
 the new equivalents. 3 
 
 1 DTrbx riN urn. »,w»n. 
 
 3 The gutturals and Aheri-letters 
 are frequently changed ; — DTIH he- 
 comes CniK (Gen. viii. 4) ; "'Nil is 
 altered into ^2 (xxiii. 18) ; H3t^ into 
 
 jnti> (xxvii. 19); ^HT stands for ^>m 
 (Deut. xxxii. 24); the PI is changed 
 into PI in words like JilJ. DTQ3, which 
 become 2i"l3, DT123 ; n is altered into 
 y-"IDn hecomes "10^. The » is fre- 
 quently doubled (? as a mater lec- 
 tionis) ; Tt^ri is substituted for 
 TDTI ; *TI"N for NTH ; "3 for >£). 
 Many words are joined together : — 
 "TimD stauds for TlTI ID (Ex. xxx. 
 23); |K3HD for |K JH3 (Gen. xli. 45); 
 D^TJ in is always Q>mnn. The 
 l>ronouns FIX and JFIX. 2nd p. fern. 
 
 sing, and plur., are changed into 
 ^DN, JTIK (the obsolete Heb. forms) 
 respectively ; the suff. ?J into "|N ; ~|- 
 iato I,' ; the termination of the 2nd 
 p. 3. fern, prrct., R-, becomes *FI, like 
 the first p. ; the verbal form Aphel is 
 used for the Hiphil ; TiTJTX for 
 TllDtn ; tlie medial letter of the verb 
 1"y is sometimes retained as N or *, 
 instead of being dropped as in the Heb. 
 
 Again, verba of the form H"? have the 
 * frequently at the end of the in fin. fut. 
 and part., instead of the il. Nouns of 
 
 the schema 7l3p (?3N, &c.) are often 
 
 spelt ^Bj3, into" which thcfoim «>)t3j3 
 
 is likewise occasionally transformed. 
 [ Of distinctly Samaritan words may
 
 41(3 
 
 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 8. The eighth and last class contains alterations made in 
 favour or on behalf of Samaritan theology, hermenentics, and 
 domestic worship. Thus the word Elohim, four times con- 
 strued with the plural verb in the Hebrew Pentateuch, is in 
 the Samaritan Pent, joined to the singular verb (Gen. xx. 
 13, xxxi. 53, xxxv. 7 ; Ex. xxii. 9) ; and further, both anthro- 
 pomorphisms as well as anthropopathisms are carefully 
 expunged — a practice very common in later times. 1 The 
 last and perhaps most momentous of all intentional altera- 
 tions is the constant change of all the li"Q\ " God will 
 choose a spot," into TQ, " He has chosen," viz. Gerizim, 
 and the well-known substitution of Gerizim for Ebal in Deut. 
 xxvii. 4 (A. V. 5) : — " It shall be when ye be gone over 
 Jordan, that ye shall set up these stones which I command 
 you this day on Mount Ebal (Sam. Gerizim), and there shalt 
 thou build an altar unto the Lord thy God," &c. This 
 passage gains a certain interest from Whiston and Kennicott 
 having charged the Jews with corrupting it from Gerizim 
 into Ebal. This supposition, however, was met by Kuther- 
 ford, Parry, Tychsen, Lobstein, Verschuir, and others, and 
 
 be mentioned : "p (Gen. xxxiv. 31) = 
 TN, TD (Chald.), " like ; " DTin, for 
 Heb. Dnin, "seal;" nmb3, "as 
 though it budded," becomes DiTlSXS 
 = Targ. nniQX "13 ; D3!"l, " wise," 
 reads DlDn ; 1]}, "spoil," HJJ ; r\V3\ 
 " days," niOV. 
 
 1 riDPPO B^K, " man of war,' - an 
 expression used of God (Ex. xv. 3), 
 becomes "O "in 3, "hero of war,'' the 
 former apparently of irreverent import 
 to the Samaritan ear; for 'fl *}X |l"JT 
 (Deut. xxix. 1'.), A. V. 20), lit. " And 
 the wrath (nose) of the Lord shall 
 smoke," 'fl F|X in*, " the wrath of the 
 Lord will be kindled," is substituted; 
 
 "iV'TinrO 7l¥ (Deut. xxxii. 18), "the 
 reck (God) which begat thee," is 
 
 changed into ~fi?iM2 11V, " the rock 
 which glorifies thee;" Gen. xix. 12, 
 D'L"3Xn, '"the men," used of the 
 
 angels, lias been replaced by D*DK?On, 
 ■• the angels." Extreme reverence for 
 the patriarchs changed "fl"lX, " Cursed 
 
 be their (Simeon and Levi's) anger," 
 into TIN, " brilliant is their anger" 
 (Gen. xlix. 7). A flagrant falsification 
 is the alteration, in an opposite Bense, 
 which they ventured in the passage 
 
 nm 1 ? pSJ» 'n T1\ "The beloved of 
 
 God [Benjamin, the founder of the 
 
 Judseo-Davidian empire, hateful to 
 
 ! the Samaritans] shall dwell securely," 
 
 j transformed by them into the almost 
 
 senseless nD3^ pL'" '."I T T, " The 
 hand, the hand of God will rest [if 
 Hiph. : pCT], 'will cause to rest] 
 
 i securely " (Deut. xxxiii. 12). Eeve- 
 \ rence for the Law and the Sacred 
 
 Hi cords gives rise to more emen- 
 dations:— VL M n»2 (Deut. xxv. 12, 
 i A. V. 11), "by his secrets,'' becomes 
 
 ntP33, "by his flesh;" na!?JB>*, 
 
 " coibit cum ea" (Deut. xxviii. 12), 
 
 niDy 23C*, " concumbet cum ea;" 
 
 ! |13'^n iblb, " to the dog shall ye 
 
 throw it '' (Ex. xxii. 30;, '^BTI *]bliT, 
 "ye shall indeed throw it [away]."'
 
 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 417 
 
 -we need only add that it is completely given up by modern 
 Biblical scholars, although it cannot be denied that there is 
 some prima facie ground for a doubt upon the subject. To 
 this class also belong more especially interpolations of really 
 existing passages, dragged out of their context for a special 
 purpose. In Exodus as well as in Deuteronomy the Sam. 
 has, immediately after the Ten Commandments, the follow- 
 ing insertions from Deut. xxvii. 2-7 and xi. 30 : " And it 
 shall be on the clay when ye shall pass over Jordan ... ye 
 shall set up these stones ... on Mount Gerizim . . . and 
 there shalt thou build an altar . . . ' That mountain ' on the 
 other side Jordan by the way where the sun goeth down . . . 
 in the champaign over against Gilgal, beside the plains 
 -of Moreh, ' over against Shecliem :' " — this last superfluous 
 addition, which is also found in Deut. xi. 30 of the Sam. 
 Pent., being ridiculed in the Talmud, as we have seen 
 ^ibove. 
 
 From the immense number of these worse than worthless 
 variants Gesenius has singled out four, which he thinks 
 preferable on the whole to those of the Masoretic Text. We 
 will confine ourselves to mentioning them, and refer the 
 reader to the recent commentaries upon them : he will find 
 that they too have since been, all but unanimously, rejected. 1 
 (1.) After the words, "And Cain spoke (l*DN'"i) to his 
 brother Abel " (Gen. iv. 8), the Sam. adds, " let us go into 
 the field," 2 in ignorance of the absol. use of "lOtf- "to say, 
 speak " (comp. Ex. xix. 25 ; 2 Chr. ii. 10, xxxii. 31), and the 
 absol. ITT (Gen. ix. 21). (2.) For nnN (Gen. xxii. 13) the 
 Sam. reads "TrlN, i-e- instead of " behind him a ram," " one 
 ram." (3.) For qij -non (Gen. xlix. 14), " an ass of bone " 
 
 i.e. a strong ass, the Sam. has DHJ T)On (Targ. D1J, Syr, 
 
 ? 
 >o^v ). And (4) for pTT (Gen. xiv. 14), "he led forth 
 
 his trained servants," the Sam. reads p-p, " he numbered." 
 We must briefly state, in concluding this portion of the 
 
 1 Keil, in the latest edition of his prove genuine, fall to the ground on 
 Introil. p. 590, note 7, says. " Even the closer examination." 
 few variants, which Gesenius tries to ! 2 n"lL"n 113^3
 
 418 OX THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 subject, that we did not choose this classification of Gesenius 
 because it appeared to us to be either systematic (Gesenius 
 says himself : " Ceterum facile perspicitur complures in his 
 esse lectiones quaruin singulas alius ad aliud genus referre 
 forsitan malit ... in una vel altera lectione ad aliam 
 classem referenda haud diflficiles erimus . . .") Or exhaustive, 
 or even because the illustrations themselves are unassailable 
 in point of the reason he assigns for them ; but because, 
 deficient as it is, it has at once and for ever silenced the 
 utterly unfounded though time-hallowed claims of the 
 Samaritan Pentateuch. It was only necessary, as we said 
 before, to collect a great number of variations (or to take 
 them from Walton), to compare them with the old text and 
 with each other, to place them in some kind of order before 
 the reader and let them tell their own tale. That this was 
 not done during the two hundred years of the contest by 
 a single one of the combatants is certainly rather strange : — 
 albeit not the only instance of the kind. 
 
 Important additions to this list have, as we hinted before, 
 been made by Frankel, such as the Samaritans' preference 
 of the imperat. for the 3rd pers. ; * ignorance of the use 
 of the abl. absol. ; 2 Galileanisms, — to which also belongs the 
 permutation of the letters Alievi 3 (comp. Erub. 53, y^, -)£n. 
 ION), in the Samaritan Cod.; the occasional softening down 
 of the 2) into 2, 4 of 3 into J, j£ into j, &c, and chiefly the 
 presence of words and phrases in the Sam. which are not 
 interpolated from parallel passages, but are entirely wanting 
 in our text. 5 Frankel derives from these passages chiefly 
 the conclusion that the Sam. Pent, was, partly at least, 
 
 1 E. g. 3"lpH for Tp> (Ex. xii. 48); I 27, after mi'M the word N^B is found 
 nrjn XT (Ex. xxxv. 10). (LXX.) ; xliii. 28, the phrase -p-Q 
 
 "' E ; ^??JI? r 1)2] ( ?^ Xiii - 13); WTbtb Ninn B»«n is inserted after 
 
 ^DjT for Dm (Num. xv. 35). .„,,,. L 
 
 3 E. g. Spm for Fpm (Gen. viii. | the Ethnach ; xlvn. 21, Dnaj? 1 ? Tnj?i"i, 
 22) ; pn for ]')]} (Gen. xxxvi. 28) ; and Ex. xxxii. 32, XDPI NSStfl DX 
 PJKKTI for nplBTl (Lev. xi. 16), &c. XL" Dn is read. An exceedingly 
 
 4 IParVl for B>BrM (Gen. xxxi. 85) ; difficult and un-Hebre'w passage is 
 ]"DE>3 for riDL"J (Ex. xv. 10). found in Ex. xxiii. 19, reading ilCJ? ^ 
 
 > Gen. xxiii. 2 after vnan nnpa ^^ Nin n ~ayi nDtr run nxr 
 
 the words pDJ? T^X are added; xxvii. ipv*
 
 OX THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 419 
 
 emendated from the LXX., Onkelos, and other very late 
 sources. (See below.) 
 
 We now subjoin, for the sake of completeness, the before- 
 mentioned thirteen classes of Kirchheim, in the original, to 
 which we have added the translation : — 
 
 1. DTi:i "in rbyzb D^WI .mSDin. [Additions and 
 alterations in the Samaritan Pentateuch in favour of Mount 
 Gerizim.] 
 
 2. rv\tib*2b mSDITI. [Additions for the purpose of com- 
 pletion.] 
 
 3. "T1N2. [Commentary, glosses.] 
 
 4. D'T^im D"^3n ^bn. [Change of verbs and moods.^ 
 
 5. r)"\WTl T^n. [Change of nouns.] 
 
 6. rWl&Tl. [Emendation of seeming irregularities by 
 assimilating forms, &c.J 
 
 7. nvm^n miDil. [Permutation of letters.] 
 
 8. D^D- [Pronouns.] 
 
 9. ]iJ2- [Gender.] 
 
 10. JT)3D"i:r7 JTPJT)N. [Letters added.] 
 
 11. Dim JTTJTiN. [Addition of prepositions, conjunctions, 
 articles, &c] 
 
 12. TH3T ynp- [Junction of separated, and separation of 
 joined words.] 
 
 13. Q^iy JT)*3% "^ [Chronological alterations.] 
 
 It may, perhaps, not be quite superfluous to observe, before 
 we proceed any further, that, since up to this moment no 
 critical edition of the Sam. Pent., or even an examination of 
 the Codices since Kennicott — who can only be said to have 
 begun the work — has been thought of, the treatment of the 
 whole subject remains a most precarious task, and beset with 
 unexampled difficulties at every step ; and also that, under 
 these circumstances, a more or less scientific arrangement of 
 isolated or common Samaritan mistakes and falsifications 
 appears to us to be a subject of very small consequence 
 indeed. 
 
 It is, however, this same rudimentary state of investiga- 
 tion — after two centuries and a half of fierce discussion — 
 
 2 e 2
 
 420 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 which has left the other and much more important question 
 of the Age and Origin of the Sam. Pent, as unsettled to-day 
 as it was when it first came under the notice of European 
 scholars. For our own part we cannot but think that as 
 long as — (1) the history of the Samaritans remains involved 
 in the obscurities of which a former article will have given 
 an account; (2) we are restricted to a small number of 
 comparatively recent Codices ; (3) neither these codices 
 themselves have, as has just been observed, been thoroughly 
 collated and recollated, nor (4) more than a feeble beginning 
 has been made with anything like a collation between the 
 various readings of the Sam. Pent, and the LXX. (Walton 
 omitted the greatest number, " cum nullum sensus varie- 
 tateni constituant ") ; — so long must we have a variety of the 
 most divergent opinions, all based on " probabilities," which 
 are designated on the other side as " false reasonings " and 
 "individual crotchets," and which, moreover, not unfre- 
 quently start from flagrantly false premisses. 
 
 We shall, under these circumstances, confine ourselves to 
 a simple enumeration of the leading opinions, and the chief 
 reasons and arguments alleged for and against them : — 
 
 (1.) The Samaritan Pentateuch came into the hands of 
 the Samaritans as an inheritance from the ten tribes whom 
 they succeeded — so the popular notion runs. Of this 
 opinion are J. Morinus, Walton, Cappellus, Kcnnicott, 
 Michaelis, Eichhorn, Bauer, Jahn, Bertholdt, Steudel, 
 Mazade, Stuart, Davidson, and others. Their reasons for it 
 may be thus briefly summed up : — 
 
 (a.) It seems improbable that the Samaritans should have 
 accepted their code at the hands of the Jews after the Exile, 
 as supposed by some critics, since there existed an intense 
 hatred between the two nationalities. 
 
 (b.) The Samaritan Canon has only the Pentateuch in 
 common with the Hebrew Canon: had that book been 
 received at the period when the Hagiographa and the 
 Prophets were in the Jews' hands, it would be surprising 
 if they had not also received those. 
 
 (c.) The Sam. Letters, avowedly the more ancient, are
 
 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 421 
 
 found in the Sam. Cod. : therefore it was written before the 
 alteration of the character into the square Hebrew — which 
 dates from the end of the Exile — took place. 
 
 [We cannot omit briefly to draw attention here to a most 
 keen-eyed suggestion of S. D. Luzzatto, contained in a letter 
 to B. Kirchheim (Carme Shomron, p. 106, &c), by the 
 adoption of which many readings in the Heb. Coclex, now 
 almost unintelligible, appear perfectly clear. He assumes 
 that the copyist who at some time or other after Ezra trans- 
 cribed the Bible into the modern square Hebrew character, 
 from the ancient copies written in so-called Samaritan, 
 occasionally mistook Samaritan letters of similar form. 1 
 And since our Sam. Pent, has those difficult readings in 
 common with the Mas. Text, that other moot point, whether 
 it was copied from a Hebrew or Samaritan Codex, would 
 thus appear to be solved. Its constant changes of ") and 7, 
 t and •), n and n — letters which are similar in Hebrew, 
 but not in Samaritan — have been long used as a powerful 
 argument for the Samaritans having received the Pent, at a 
 very late period indeed.] 
 
 Since the above opinion — that the Pent, came into the 
 hands of the Samaritans from the Ten Tribes — is the most 
 popular one, we will now adduce some of the chief reasons 
 brought against it, and the reader will see by the somewhat 
 feeble nature of the arguments on either side, that the last 
 word has not yet been spoken in the matter. 
 
 (a.) There existed no religious animosity whatsoever 
 between Judah and Israel when they separated. The ten 
 tribes could not therefore have bequeathed such an animosity 
 
 1 E. f/., Is. xi. 15, D'tyl instead of years instead of forty (cornp. Jer. Sot. 
 
 DWa (adopted by (Jesenius in Thes- 1), accounted for by the 13 (numerical 
 
 p. 1017 o, without a mention of its letter for forty) in the original being 
 
 source, which he, however, distinctly mistaken for 3 (twenty). Again, 2 
 
 avowed to Rosenmuller— comp. C"3, Chr. xxii. 2, forty is put instead of 
 
 p. 107, note K) ; Jer. iii. 8, &ON1 twenty (comp. 2 K. viii. 26) ; 2 K. xxii. 
 
 instead of Sim ; 1 Sam. xxiv. 11; 4, Dm for^JVI; Ez. iii. 12, -p-Q for 
 
 Dnm for DPIX1; Ezr. vi. 4; nin Dm, &c. ;— all these letters— /ft and 
 
 for Kli1; Ez. xxii. 20, Timm for _, . , . __ _ . ^ "' _ 
 
 »nnem; Judg. xv. 20 ; vmw— ^ & and A > 3 and ^ * and * 
 
 Sarn.son's reign during the time of the ' — resembling each other very closely. 
 Philistines being given as twenty
 
 422 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 to those who succeeded them, and who, we may add, pro- 
 bably cared as little originally for the disputes between 
 Judah and Israel, as colonists from far-off countries, belong- 
 ing to utterly different races, are likely to care for the 
 quarrels of the aborigines who formerly inhabited the 
 country. On the contrary, the contest between the slowly 
 judaized Samaritans and the Jews, only dates from the 
 moment when the latter refused to recognise the claims 
 of the former, as belonging to the people of God, and rejected 
 their aid in building the Temple : why then, it is said, should 
 they not first have received the one book which would bring 
 them into still closer conformity with the returned exiles, at 
 their hands ? That the Jews should yet have refused to 
 receive them as equals is no more surprising than that the 
 Samaritans from that time forward took their stand upon 
 this very Law — altered according to their circumstances ; 
 and proved from it that they and they alone were the 
 Jews /car £%oyj)v. 
 
 (b.) Their not possessing any other book of the Hebrew 
 Canon is not to be accounted for by the circumstance that 
 there w r as no other book in existence at the time of the 
 schism, because many psalms of David, writings of Solomon, 
 &c., must have been circulating among the people. But the 
 jealousy with which the Samaritans regarded Jerusalem, 
 and the intense hatred which they naturally conceived 
 against the post-Mosaic writers of national Jewish history, 
 would sufficiently account for their rejecting the other 
 books, in all of which, save Joshua, Judges, and Job, either 
 Jerusalem, as the centre of worship, or David and his House, 
 are extolled. If, however, Loewe has really found with 
 them, as he reports in the Allgem. Zeitung d. Jndenth. April 
 18th, 1839, our Book of Kings and Solomon's Song of 
 songs, — which they certainly would not have received 
 .subsequently, — all these arguments are perfectly gratuitous. 
 
 (c.) The present Hebrew character was not introduced by 
 Ezra after the return from the Exile, but came into use at a 
 much later period. The Samaritans might therefore have 
 received the Pentateuch at the hands of the returned exiles,
 
 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 423 
 
 who, according to the Talmud, afterwards changed their 
 writing, and in the Pentateuch only, so as to distinguish it 
 from the Samaritan. " Originally," says Mar Sutra (San- 
 lieclr. xxi. b), " the Pentateuch was given to Israel in Ibri 
 writing and the Holy (Hebrew) language : it was again 
 given to them in the days of Ezra in the Asliurith writing 
 and Aramaic language. Israel then selected the Ashurith 
 writing and the Holy language, and left to the Hediotes 
 ('ISiWTat) the Ibri writing and the Aramaic language. AYho 
 are the Hediotes ? The Cuthim (Samaritans). What is 
 Ibri writing? The Libonaah (Samaritan)." It is well 
 known also that the Maccabean coins bear Samaritan in- 
 scriptions : so that " Hediotes " would point to the common 
 use of the Samaritan character for ordinary purposes, down 
 to a very late period. 
 
 (2.) The second leading opinion on the age and origin of 
 the Sam. Pent, is that it was introduced' by Manasseh 
 (comp. Josephus, Ant. xi. 8, § 2, 4) at the time of the founda- 
 tion of the Samaritan Sanctuary on Mount Gerizim (Ant. 
 van Dale, K. Simon, Prideaux, Fulda, Hasse, De Wette, 
 Gesenius, Hupfeld, Hengstenberg, Keil, &c). In support of 
 this opinion are alleged, the idolatry of the Samaritans 
 before they received a Jewish priest through Esarhaddon 
 2 K. xvii. 21-33), and the immense number of readings com- 
 mon to the LXX. and this Code, against the Masoretic Text. 
 
 (3.) Other, but very isolated notions, are those of Morin, 
 Le Clerc, Poncet, &c, that the Israelitish priest sent by the 
 king of Assyria to instruct the new inhabitants in the 
 religion of the country brought the Pentateuch with him. 
 Further, that the Samaritan Pentateuch was the production 
 of an impostor, Dositheus (^iODH in Talmud), who lived 
 during the time of the Apostles, and who falsified the sacred 
 records in order to prove that he was the Messiah (Ussher). 
 Against which there is only this to be observed, that there is 
 not the slightest alteration of such a nature to be found. 
 Finally, that it is a very late and faulty recension, with 
 additions and corruptions of the Masoretic Text (6th century 
 -after Christ), into which glosses from the LXX. had been
 
 424 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 received (Frankel). Many other suggestions have been 
 made, but we cannot here dwell upon them : suffice it to 
 have mentioned those to which a certain popularity and 
 authority attaches. 
 
 Another question has been raised : — Have all the variants 
 which we find in our copies been introduced at once, or are 
 they the work of many generations ? From the number of 
 vague opinions on that point, we have only room here to 
 adduce that of Azariah de Rossi, who traces many of the- 
 glosses (Class 2) both in the Sam. and in the LXX. to an 
 ancient Targum in the hands of the people at the time of 
 Ezra, and refers to the Talmudical passage of Nedar. 37 : 
 "And he read in the Book of the Law of God — this is 
 Mikra, the Pentateuch; timsft explanatory, this is Tar gum? 
 Considering that no Masorah fixed the letters and signs of 
 the Samar. Codex, and that, as we have noticed, the prin- 
 cipal object was to make it read as smoothly as possible, it 
 is not easily seen why each succeeding century should not 
 have added its own emendations. But, here too, investi- 
 gation still wanders about in the mazes of speculation. 
 
 The chief opinions with respect to the agreement of the 
 numerous and as yet uninvestigated — even uncounted — 
 readings of the LXX. (of which likewise no critical edition 
 exists as yet), and the Sam. Pent, are : — 
 
 1. That the LXX. have translated from the Sam. (De 
 Dieu, Selden, Hottinger, Hassencamp, Eichhorn, &c). 
 
 2. That mutual interpolations have taken place (Grotius, 
 Ussher, Ravius, &c). 
 
 3. That both Versions were formed from Hebrew 7 Codices, 
 which differed among themselves as well as from the one which 
 afterwards obtained public authority in Palestine ; that how- 
 ever very many wilful corruptions and interpolations have 
 crept in in later times (Gesenius). 
 
 4. That the Samar. has, in the main, been altered from the 
 LXX. (Frankel). 
 
 It must, on the other hand, be stated also, that the Sam. 
 and LXX. quite as often disagree with each other, and follow 
 each the Masor. Text. Also, that the quotations in the N. r l\ 

 
 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 425 
 
 from the LXX., where they coincide with the Sam. against 
 the Hebr. Text, are so small in number and of so unim- 
 portant a nature that they cannot be adduced as any argu- 
 ment whatsoever. 
 
 The following is a list of the MSS. of the Sam. Pent, now 
 in European Libraries [Kennicott] :— 
 
 No. 1. Oxford (Ussher) Bodl., fob, No. 3127. Perfect, 
 except the 20 first and 9 last verses. 
 
 No. 2. Oxford (Ussher) Bodl., 4to., No. 3128, with an 
 Arabic version in Sam. characters. Imperfect. Wanting the 
 whole of Leviticus and many portions of the other books. 
 
 No. 3. Oxford (Ussher) Bodl., 4to., No. 3129. Wanting" 
 many portions in each book. 
 
 No. 4. Oxford (Ussher, Laud) Bodl., 4to., No. 621. De- 
 fective in parts of Deut. 
 
 No. 5. Oxford (Marsh) Bodl., 12mo., No. 15. Wanting 
 some verses in the beginning ; 21 chapters obliterated. 
 
 No. 6. Oxford (Pocock) Bodl., 24mo., No. 5328. Parts of 
 leaves lost ; otherwise perfect. 
 
 No. 7. London (Ussher) Br. Mus. Claud. B. 8. Vellum. 
 Complete. 254 leaves. 
 
 No. 8. Paris (Peiresc) Imp. Libr., Sam. No. 1. Recent 
 MS. containing the Hebr. and Sam. Texts, with an Arab. 
 Vers, in the Sam. character. Wanting the first 31 chapters, 
 and very defective in many places. 
 
 No. 9. Paris (Peiresc) Imp. Libr., Sam. No. 2. Ancient 
 MS., wanting first 17 chapters of Gen. ; and all Deut. from 
 the 7th chapter. Houbigant, however, quotes from Gen. x. 
 11 of this Codex, a rather puzzling circumstance. 
 
 No. 10. Paris (Harl. de Sancy) Oratory, No. 1. The 
 famous MS. of P. della Valle. 
 
 No. 11. Paris (Dom. Nolin) Oratory, No. 2. Made-up copy. 
 No. 12. Paris (Libr. St. Genev.). Of little value. 
 No. 13. Home (Peir. and Barber.) Vatican, No. 106. 
 Hebr. and Sam. texts, with Arab. Vers, in Sam. character. 
 Very defective and recent. Dated the 7th century (?). 
 
 No. 14. Kome (Card. Cobellutius), Vatican. Also sup- 
 posed to be of the 7th century, but very doubtful.
 
 42(3 
 
 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 No. 15. Milan (Ambrosian Libr.) Said to be very ancient; 
 not collated. 
 
 No. 16. Leyden (Golius MS.), fol., No. 1. Said to be 
 complete. 
 
 No. 17. Gotha (Ducal Libr.). A fragment only. 
 
 No. 18. London, Count of Paris' Library. With Version. 
 
 Printed editions are contained in the Paris and Walton 
 Polyglots ; and a separate reprint from the latter was made 
 by Blayney, Oxford, 1790. A Facsimile of the 20th chapter 
 of Exodus, from one of the Ndblus MSS., has been edited,with 
 portions of the corresponding Masoretic text, and a Russian 
 Translation and Introduction, byLevysohn, Jerusalem I860. 1 
 
 II. Versions. 
 
 1. Samaritan. — -The origin, author, and age of the Sama- 
 ritan Version of the Five Books of Moses, has hitherto — so 
 Eichhorn quaintly observes — " always been a golden apple to 
 the investigators, and will very probably remain so, until 
 people leave off venturing decisive judgments upon historical 
 subjects which no one has recorded in antiquity." And, 
 indeed, modern investigators, keen as they have been, have 
 <lone little towards the elucidation of the subject. According 
 to the Samaritans themselves (De Sacy Mem. 3 ; Paulus ; 
 Winer), their high-priest Nathaniel, who died about 20 B.C., 
 is its author. Gesenius puts its date a few years after 
 Christ. Juynboll thinks that it had long been in use in the 
 second post-Christian century. Frankel places it in the 
 post-Mohammedan time. Other investigators date it from 
 the time of Esarhaddon's priest (Schwarz), or either shortly 
 before or after the foundation of the temple on Mount 
 ( ilerizim. It seems certain, however, that it was composed 
 
 1 The original intention of the 
 Russian Government to publish the 
 win ile Codex in the same manner 
 is to have been given up for the 
 present. We can only hope that, if 
 the work is ever taken up again, it 
 will fall into more competent hands. 
 
 Mr. Levysohn's Introduction, brief as 
 it is, shows him to be utterly wanting 
 both in scholarship and critical acu- 
 men, and to be, moreover, entirely un- 
 acquainted with the fact that his new 
 discoveries have been disposed of 
 some hundred and fifty years since.
 
 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 427 
 
 before the destruction of the second temple ; and being 
 intended, like the Targums, for the use of the people exclu- 
 sively, it was written in the popular [Samaritan idiom, a 
 mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac. 
 
 In this version the original has been followed, with a very 
 few exceptions, in a slavish and sometimes perfectly childish 
 manner, the sense evidently being of minor consideration. 
 As a very striking instance of this may be adduced the 
 translation of Deut. iii. 9 : " The Zidonians call Hermon 
 THttf (Shirion), and the Amorites call it T2# (Shenir)." 
 The translator deriving "piltf from -ntf " prince, master," 
 renders it p-i " masters ; " and finding the letters reversed in 
 the appellation of the Amorites as TOtf/, reverses also the 
 sense in his version, and translates it by " slaves " ]HH^^D ! 
 In other cases, where no Samaritan equivalent could be found 
 for a Hebrew word, the translator, instead of paraphrasing it, 
 simply transposes its letters, so as to make it look Samaritan. 
 Occasionally he is misled by the orthography of the original : 
 : W9N p DN, " If so, where ....?" he renders r»W"lK p DN, 
 " If so, I shall be wrath : " mistaking ^3tf for ^3tf, from s)N 
 " anger." On the whole it may be considered a very valuable 
 aid towards the study of the Samar. Text, on account of its 
 very close verbal adherence. A few cases, however, may be 
 brought forward, where the Version has departed from the 
 Text, either under the influence of popular religious notions, 
 or for the sake of explanation. " We pray " — so they write 
 to Scaliger — " every' day in the morning and in the evening, 
 as it is said, the one lamb shalt thou prepare in the morning 
 and the second in the evening ; we bow to the ground and 
 worship God." xVccordingly, we rind the translator rendering 
 the passage, " And Isaac went to ' walk ' (mttf 1 ?) in the field," 
 by — "and Isaac went to pray (nN^UD 1 ?) in the field." " And 
 Abraham rose in the morning (~ip"Q2)," is rendered "b'AI, 
 '"' in the prayer," &c. Anthropomorphisms are avoided. " The 
 image (nyon) °f God" is rendered jlft^, "the glory." 
 iTMT ^, "the mouth of Jehovah," is transformed into "lQiD 
 mrP, " the word of Jehovah." For dt6n, " God," rPDN^D, 
 " Angel " is frequently found, &c. A great difficulty is
 
 428 
 
 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 offered by the proper names uLicli this version often substi- 
 tutes, they being, in many cases, less intelligible than the 
 original ones. 1 The similarity it has with Onkelos occasion- 
 ally amounts to complete identity, for instance — 
 
 Onkelos in Polyglott. — Num. vi. 1, 2. 
 
 taroftsn uy bbrz : navb nmn ny mrr bbm 
 
 tjj Tteb t^nsr na xnnx in in: \\rtb -io\m 
 
 *rr ir p\nyi mrr "iDrro : mrr Dip itob nth 
 
 nnns ^m \nttp n 1 ? p\ny "lam brn mrr mam 
 
 •^D" ab p^n*) v^oi mm mikp n 1 ? pw 
 
 Sam. Vers, in Barberini Triglott. — Num. vi. 1, 2. 
 
 bxrw* ^n Dy ^a : myvb rrcna ny mrp fei 
 m: ma 1 ? wist -d nna in naj pn^ navn 
 
 \an -pp ami ~iarr p : rnn 1 "? mnna^ tu 
 
 pty mf "iia "?3i Rnt^ n 1 ? ami wi nam 
 
 •^D" n 1 ? pirn pn^ai paayi nn?^ n 1 ? 
 
 1 A list of the more remarkable of 
 
 these, 
 
 in the 
 
 case of geographical 
 
 names, 
 
 is subjoined : — 
 
 Gen 
 
 viii. 4, 
 
 or Ararat, Saremlib, 
 
 
 x. 10, 
 
 „ Shinar, Tsofah, 
 nSIS (? Zobah). 
 
 
 11, 
 
 „ Asshur, A stun, 
 
 poop. 
 
 
 
 ,, Behoboth, Satcan, 
 POD (? Sitta- 
 cene). 
 
 
 — 
 
 ,, Calah. Laksah, 
 HDP 1 ?. 
 
 
 12, 
 
 „ Eesen,Asfdh,nDDy. 
 
 
 30, 
 
 „ M- sha, Mesbal, 
 
 
 xi. 9, 
 
 „ Babel, Lilak. py?. 
 
 
 xiii. li, 
 
 „ Ai, Cefrah, mS3 (? 
 Cephirah, Josh, 
 ix. 17). 
 
 
 xiv. 5, 
 
 „ Ashteroth Karnaim, 
 Atinith Karniah, 
 
 Tfynp ivraj?. 
 
 
 — 
 
 „ Ham, Lishah, Hu'v. 
 
 
 — 6, 
 
 „ El Paran, Pe'ishah, 
 
 &c., ne6s di-13 
 
 
 -14, 
 
 „ Dan, Banias, DN"03. 
 
 
 -15, 
 
 „ Hobah,Fogah,nJ1D. 
 
 Gen. xiv. 17, for Shaveh, Mifneh, 
 
 naa». 
 
 xv. S, „ Euphrates,Shalmah. 
 
 — 20, „ Eephaim, Chasah. 
 
 riKDn. 
 
 xx. 1, „ Gerar, Askelun, 
 
 })bpDV. 
 
 xxvi. 2, „ Mitsiaim, Nefik. 
 P'Ql (? Exodus). 
 
 xxxvi. 8, 9, &c. „ Seir, G a blah, Tlbli 
 (Jebal). 
 
 37, „ Behoboth, Fathi, 
 
 Num. xxi. 33, „ Bashan, Bathnin. 
 
 pjm (Batanspa). 
 
 xxxiv. 10, „ Shepham/Abaniiah. 
 
 rVEOy (Apa- 
 
 msea). 
 
 11, „ Shcpham,'Afamiah. 
 
 TVOSSf. 
 
 Deut. ii. 9, „ Ar ("IJ7), Arshah, 
 
 rant 
 
 iii. 4, „ Argob, Bigobaah, 
 
 nN3iancPa7oi3o . 
 
 — 17, „ Chinnereth, Ge- 
 
 nesar, "ID33. 
 17. 48, „ Sion, Tur Telga, 
 
 x:bn -iid (Jebei 
 
 et Telj).
 
 ON THE SAMAEITAN PENTATEUCH. 429 
 
 But no safe conclusion as to the respective relation of the 
 two versions can be drawn from this. 
 
 This Version has likewise, in passing through the hands of 
 copyists and commentators, suffered many interpolations and 
 corruptions. The first copy of it was brought to Europe by 
 De la Valle, together with the Sam. Text, in 1616. Joh. 
 Nedrinus first published it together with a faulty Latin 
 translation in the Paris Polyglott, whence it was, with a 
 few emendations, reprinted in Walton, with some notes by 
 Castellus. Single portions of it appeared in Halle, ed. by 
 Cellarius, 1705, and by Uhlemann, Leipz , 1837. Compare 
 Gesenius, De Pent. Sam. Origine, &c, and Winer's mono- 
 graph, De Versionis Pent. Sam. Indole, &c, Leipzig, 1817. 
 
 2. To XafiapeoTLKov. The hatred between the Samaritans 
 and the Jews is supposed to have caused the former to prepare 
 a Greek translation of their Pent, in opposition to the LXX. 
 of the Jews. In this way at least the existence of certain 
 fragments of a Greek Version of the Sam. Pent., preserved 
 in some MSS. of the LXX., together with portions of 
 Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, &c, is accounted for. 
 These fragments are supposed to be alluded to by the Greek 
 Fathers under the name Xa/jLapentKov. It is doubtful how- 
 ever whether it ever existed (as Gesenius, Winer, Juynboll, 
 suppose) in the shape of a complete translation, or only 
 designated (as Castellus, Voss, Herbst hold) a certain number 
 of scholia translated from the Sam. Version. Other critics 
 again (Havernick, Hengstenberg, &c.) see in it only a cor- 
 rected edition of certain passages of the LXX. 
 
 3. In 1070 an Arabic Version of the Sam. Pent, was made 
 by Abu Said in Egypt, on the basis of the Arabic translation 
 of Saadjah haggaon. Like the original Samaritan it avoids 
 Anthropomorphisms and Anthropopathisms, replacing the 
 latter by Euphemisms, besides occasionally making some 
 slight alterations, more especially in proper nouns. It is 
 extant in several MS. copies in European libraries, and is 
 now in course of being edited by Kuenen, Leyden, 1850-54, 
 &c. It appears to have been drawn up from the Sam. Text, 
 not from the Sam. Version ; the Hebrew words occasionally
 
 430 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 remaining unaltered in the translation. 1 Often also it 
 renders the original differently from the Samar. Version. 2 
 Principally noticeable is its excessive dread of assigning 
 to God anything like human attributes, physical or mental. 
 For DTT^N iTliTj " God," we find (as in Saadiak sometimes) 
 Al\ ,«J}U, " the Angel of God ; " for " the eyes of God " we 
 have (Dent ix. 12) &) *k-.iU> " the Beholding of God." 
 For " Bread of God:" f j5J "the necessary," &c. Again, it 
 occasionally adds honourable epithets where the Scripture 
 seems to have omitted them, &c. Its language is far from 
 elegant or even correct ; and its use must likewise be con- 
 fined to the critical study of the Sam. Text. 
 
 4. To this Arabic version Abu Barachat, a Syrian, wrote 
 in 1208 a somewhat paraphrastic commentary, which has by 
 degrees come to be looked upon as a new Version — the 
 Sijriac, in contradistinction to the Arabic, and which is often 
 confounded with it in the MSS. On both Kecensions see 
 Eichhorn, Gesenius, Juynboll, &c. 
 
 111. Samaritan Literature. 
 
 It may perhaps not be superfluous to add here a concise 
 account of the Samaritan literature in general, since to a 
 certain degree it bears upon our subject. 
 
 1. Chronicon Samaritanum. — Of the Pentateuch and its 
 Versions we have spoken. "We have also mentioned that 
 the Samaritans have no other book of our Received Canon. 
 " There is no Prophet but Moses " is one of their chief 
 dogmas, and fierce are the invectives in which they indulge 
 against men like Samuel, "a Magician and an Infidel," JS z 
 
 1 /:. g. Ex. xiii. 12, Dm TBB ^2 j renders % . Gen. xli. 43, fOK 
 
 (Sam. Ver. cm WriS k) remains (gam Vt „" TTO = ^ {) the Arab . 
 
 virli VT : xxi. 3, PICK ty3 (Sam. 
 ^° J° ' translates ^\ cJyLciJj = *p 3K. 
 
 Ver. nnN jnDO) is given : \^,\ y^ 3 A won j* i t may be observed by 
 '-' Thus i"ITy, Gen. xlix. 11 (Sam. the way, taken by the Mohammedans 
 Ver. nmp, " his city "), the Arab, from the Rabbinical ("p^S) "1313.
 
 OX THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 431 
 
 (Chron. Sam.); Eli; Solomon, "Shiloh" (Gen. xlix. 10), 
 " i.e. the man who shall spoil the Law and whom many 
 nations will follow because of their own licentiousness " (De 
 Sacy, Mem. 4) ; Ezra " cursed for ever " (Lett, to Huntington, 
 &c). Joshua alone, partly on account of his being an Ephrai- 
 mite, partly because Shechem was selected by him as the 
 scene of his solemn valedictory address, seems to have found 
 favour in their eyes ; but the Booh of Joshua, which they 
 perhaps possessed in its original form, gradually came to 
 form only the groundwork of a fictitious national Samaritan 
 history, overgrown with the most fantastic and anachronistic 
 legends. This is the so-called "Samaritan Joshua," or 
 Chronicon Samaritanum (^j . *i^j Ju*), sent to Scaliger 
 by the Samaritans of Cairo in 1584. It was edited by Juyn- 
 boll (Leyden 1848), and his acute investigations have shown 
 that it was redacted into its present form about a.d. 1300, 
 out of four special documents, three of which were Arabic, 
 and one Hebrew (i. e. Samaritan). The Leyden MS. in two 
 parts, which Gesenius, De Sam. Theol. p. 8. n. 18, thinks 
 unique, is dated a.h. 764-919 (a.d. 1362-1513) ;— the Cod. 
 in the Brit. Museum, lately acquired, dates a.h. 908 (a.d. 
 1502). The chronicle embraces the time from Joshua to 
 about a.d. 350, and was originally written in, or subsequently 
 translated into, Arabic. After eight chapters of introductory 
 matter begins the early history of " Israel " under " King 
 Joshua," who, among other deeds of arms, wages war, with 
 300,000 mounted men — " half Israel " — against two kings of 
 Persia. The last of his five " royal " successors is Shimshon 
 (Samson), the handsomest and most powerful of them all. 
 These reigned for the space of 250 years, and were followed 
 by five high-priests, the last of whom was Usi (? — Uzzi, Ezr. 
 vii. 4). With the history of Eli, " the seducer," which then 
 follows, and Samuel " a sorcerer," the account by a sudden 
 transition runs . off to Nebuchadnezzar (eh. 45), Alexander 
 (ch. 46), and Hadrian (47), and closes suddenly at the time 
 of Julian the Apostate. 
 
 We shall only adduce here a single specimen out of tbe
 
 432 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 45th chapter of the Book, which treats of the subject of the 
 Pentateuch : — 
 
 Nebuchadnezzar was king of Persia (Mossul), and con- 
 quered the - whole world, also the kings of Syria. In the 
 thirteenth year of their subjugation they rebelled, together 
 with the kings of Jerusalem (Kodsh). Whereupon the 
 Samaritans, to escape from the vengeance of their pursuer, 
 fled, and Persian colonists took their place. A curse, how- 
 ever, rested upon the land, and the new immigrants died 
 from eating of its fruits (Joseph. Ant. ix. 14. § 3). The chiefs 
 of Israel (i.e. Samaritans), being asked the reason of this by 
 the king, explained it by the abolition of the worship of God. 
 The king upon this permitted them to return and to erect a 
 temple, in which work he promised to aid them, and he gave 
 them a letter to all their dispersed brethren. The whole 
 Dispersion now assembled, and the Jews said, " We will now 
 go up into the Holy City (Jerusalem) and live there in 
 unity." But the sons of Haiun (Aaron) and of Joseph (i.e. 
 the priests and the Samaritans) insisted upon going to the 
 " Mount of Blessing," Gerizim. The dispute was referred to 
 the king, and while the Samaritans proved their case from 
 the books of Moses, the Jews grounded their preference for 
 Jerusalem on the post-Mosaic books. The superior force 
 of the Samaritan argument was fully recognised by the king. 
 But as each side — by the mouth of their spokesmen, San- 
 ballat and Zerubbabel respectively — charged the other with 
 basing its claims on a forged document, the sacred books of 
 each party were subjected to the ordeal of fire. The Jewish 
 Record was immediately consumed, while the Samaritan 
 leaped three times from the flames into the king's lap : the 
 third time, however, a portion of the scroll, upon which the 
 king had spat, was found to have been consumed. Thirty- 
 six Jews were immediately beheaded, and the Samaritans, 
 to the number of 300,000, wept, and all Israel worshipped 
 henceforth upon Mount Gerizim — " and so we will ask our 
 help from the grace of God, who has in His mercy granted 
 all these things, and in Him we will confide." 
 
 2. From this work chiefly has been compiled another
 
 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 433 
 
 Chronicle written in the 14th century (1355), by Abu'l 
 Fatah. 1 This comprises the history of the Jews and Sama- 
 ritans from Adam to a.h. 756 and 798 (a.d. 1355 and 1397) 
 respectively (the forty-two years must have been added by a 
 later historiographer). It is of equally low historical value ; 
 its only remarkable feature being its adoption of certain 
 Talmudical legends, which it took at second hand from 
 Josippon ben Gorion. According to this chronicle, the 
 Deluge did not cover Gerizim, in the same manner as the 
 Midrash (Ber. Bab.) exempts the whole of Palestine from it. 
 A specimen, likewise on the subject of the Pentateuch, may 
 not be out of place : — 
 
 In the year of the world 4150, and in the 10th year of 
 Philadelphus, this king wished to learn the difference be- 
 tween the Law of the Samaritans, and that of the Jews. He 
 therefore bade both send him some of their elders. The 
 Samaritans delegated Ahron, Sumla, and Hudmaka : the 
 Jews, Eleazar only. The king assigned houses to them, and 
 gave them each an adept of the Greek language, in order 
 that he might assist them in their translation. The Sama- 
 ritans rendered only their Pentateuch into the language of 
 the land, while Eleazar produced a translation of the whole 
 Canon. The king, perceiving variations in the respective 
 Pentateuchs, asked the Samaritans the reason of it. Where- 
 upon they replied that these differences chiefly turned upon 
 two points. (1.) God had chosen the Mount of Gerizim : 
 and if the Jews were right, why was there no mention of it in 
 their Thora ? (2.) The Samaritans read, Deut. xxxii. 35, uvb 
 Dpi? " to the day of vengeance and reward"— the Jews 
 Dpi "b, " Mine is vengeance and reward " — which left it 
 uncertain whether that reward was to be given here or in the 
 world to come. The king then asked what was their opinion 
 about the Jewish prophets and their writings, and they 
 replied, "Either they must have said and contained what 
 
 i Jt it _••;« \ Imp- Library, Paris). Two copies in 
 
 jjj^l yi^V ^XJ) yj\ j Ber]in Library ^Petermann, Rosen) 
 
 iSy~^ S J*^ ^Ul (BoJl. ; 1 recently acquired. 
 
 2 F
 
 434 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 stood in the Pentateuch, and then their saying it again was 
 superfluous ; or more ; or less ; l either of which was again 
 distinctly prohibited in the Thora ; or finally they must 
 have changed the Laws, and these were unchangeable." A 
 Greek who stood near, observed that Laws must be adapted 
 to different times, and altered accordingly ; whereupon the 
 Samaritan proved that this was only the case with human, 
 not with Divine Laws : moreover, the seventy Elders had 
 left them the explicit command not to accept a word beside 
 the Thora. The king now fully approved of their translation, 
 and gave them rich presents. But to the Jews he strictly 
 enjoined, not even to approach Mount Gerizim. There can 
 be no doubt that there is a certain historical fact, however 
 contorted, at the bottom of this (comp. the Talmudical and 
 other accounts of the LXX.), but we cannot now further 
 pursue the subject. A lengthened extract from this chronicle 
 — the original text with a German translation — is given by 
 Schnurrer in Paulus' Neue Rejpertorium, 1790, 117-159. 
 
 3. Another " historical " work is the ^AojJSS i_»UT on the 
 history and genealogy of the patriarchs, from Adam to 
 Moses, attributed to Moses himself ; perhaps the same which 
 Petermann saw at Ndllus, and which consisted of sixteen 
 vellum leaves (supposed, however, to contain the history of 
 the world down to the end). An anonymous recent com- 
 mentary on it, a.h. 1200, a.d. 1784, is in the Brit. Mus. (No. 
 1140, Add.). 
 
 4. Of other Samaritan works, chiefly in Arabic — their Sama- 
 ritan and Hebrew literature having mostly been destroyed 
 by the Emperor Commodus — may be briefly mentioned Com- 
 mentaries upon the whole or parts of their Pentateuch, by 
 Zadaka b. Manga b. Zadaka ; 2 further, by Maddib Eddin 
 Jussuf b. Abi Said b. Khalef ; by Ghazal Ibn Abu-1-Surur 
 Al-Safawi Al-Ghazzi 3 (a.h. 1167-8, a.d. 1753-4, Brit, Mus.), 
 &c. Theological works chiellv in Arabic, mixed with Sania- 
 
 1 Compare the well-known dictum Botll.). 
 
 of Omar on the Alexandrian Library \ 3 Under the title ^^Jtl} t_jL£lT 
 (Gibbon, on. 51). • •• , -^— 
 
 2 ^t^uJl £jJJ. (13th century, t^l^Jl^J ^c-
 
 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 435 
 
 ritanisms, by Abul Hassan of Tyre, On the religious Manners 
 and Customs of the Samaritans and the World to come; by 
 Mowaffek Eddin Zadaka el Israili, A Compendium of Reli- 
 gion, on the Nature of the Divine Being, on Man, on the 
 Worship of God ; by Amin Eddin Abu'l Baracat, On the Ten 
 Commandments ; by Abu'l Hassan Ibn El Markum Gonajem 
 ben Abulfaraj' Ibn Chatdr, On Penance ; by Muhaddib Eddin 
 Jussuf Ibn Salamah Ibn Jussuf Al Askari, An Exposition of 
 the Mosaic Laics, &c. &c. Some grammatical works may be 
 farther mentioned, by Abu Ishak Ibrahim, On the Hebrew 
 Language ; by Abu Said, On reading the Hebrew Text 
 \JLtl\ uj^\*9- This grammar begins in the following charac- 
 teristic manner : — 
 
 " Thus said the Sheikh, rich in good works and knowledge, 
 the model, the abstemious, the well-guided Abu Said, to 
 whom God be merciful and compassionate. 
 
 " Praise be unto God for His help, and I ask for His 
 guidance towards a clear exposition. I have resolved to lay 
 down a few rules for the proper manner of reading the Holy 
 Writ, on account of the difference which I found, with respect 
 to it, among our co-religionists — whom may God make 
 numerous and inspire to obedience unto Him ! — and in such 
 a manner that I shall bring proofs for my assertions, from 
 which the wise could in no way differ. But God knows 
 best! 
 
 " Rule 1 : With all their discrepancies about dogmas or 
 religious views, yet all the confessors of the Hebrew religion 
 agree in this, that the Ji of the first pers. (sing, pert'.) is 
 always pronounced with Kasra, and that a i follows it, pro- 
 vided it has no suffix. It is the same, when the suffix of the 
 plural Q is added to it, according to the unanimous tes- 
 timony of the MSS., &c." 
 
 The treatise concludes, at the end of the 12th Canon or 
 Eule :— 
 
 '• Often also the perfect is used in the form of the im- 
 perative. Thus it is reported of a man of the best reputation, 
 that he had used the form of the imperative in the passage 
 {Ex. iii. 13), laty HD "b 1101*1 — ' And they shall say to 
 
 2 f 2
 
 436 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 me, What is his name ? ' He who reported this to me, is a 
 man of very high standing, against whose truthfulness nothing 
 can be brought forward. But God knows best! 
 
 " There are now a few more words to be treated, of which, 
 however, we will treat viva voce. And blessed be His name 
 for evermore." 
 
 5. Their Liturgical literature is more extensive, and not 
 without a certain poetical value. It consists chiefly of 
 hymns (Defter. Durran) and prayers for Sabbath and Feast- 
 days, and of occasional prayers at nuptials, circumcisions, 
 burials, and the like. We subjoin a few specimens from 
 MSS. in the British Museum, transcribed into Hebrew 
 characters. 
 
 The following is part of a Litany for the dead : — 
 
 • "pwni • ini • tdto • dti^n . mm • *rw 
 . apyn . pmn • Dn-QN • p warn • TTnzni 
 
 Lord Jehovah, Elohim, for Thy mercy, and for Thine own sake, and for 
 Thy name, and for Thy glory, and for the sake of our Lords Abraham, and 
 Isaac, and Jacob, and our .Lords Moses and Aaron, and Eleazar, and 
 Ithamar, and Pinehas, and Joshua, and Caleb, and the Holy Angels, and 
 the seventy Elders, and the holy mountain of Gerizim, Beth El. If Thou 
 acceptest [DTJI] this prayer [NlpD] = reading], may there go forth from 
 before Thy holy countenance a gilt sent to protect the spirit of Thy ser- 
 vant, t iVi j| iVi [N. the son of N.], of the sons of [ ], daughter 
 
 [ ] from the sons of [ ]. Lord Jehovah, in Thy mercy have 
 
 compassion on him ( A [or] have compassion on her), and rest his (her) 
 soul in the garden of Eden ; and forgive him ( A [or] her), and all the 
 congregation of Israel [who flock to Mount Gerizim Beth El. Amen. 
 Through Moses the trusty. Amen, Amen, Amen. 
 
 The next is part of a hymn (see Kirchheim's Carme 
 Shomron, emendations on Gesenius, Carm. Sam. iii.) : — 
 
 1. 
 
 "intf NVN i"6n JT 1 ? There is no God but one, 
 
 HQ^p D^H^N The everlasting God, 
 
 Ubyb ly D^p"T w h° liveth for ever ; 
 
 Xbvi "?D ^ »"6N God above all powers, 
 
 dS* 1 ? p ''QQl ^ u d wno tuu s rcmaineth for ever.
 
 ON THE SAMAKITAN PENTATEUCH. 437 
 
 Yrnj"l2 1"Q1 ITni In Thy great power shall we trust, 
 
 pD "111 PiHl For Thou art our Lord ; 
 
 J1HJN1 imr6N2 In Thy Godhead ; for Thou hast conducted 
 
 i"T!£^1 ]D TM2?y The world from beginning. 
 
 3. 
 
 •TDD IJin^Jl Thy power was hidden, 
 "J^nn "prTiDI And Thy glory and mercy. 
 H/1KDD1 nj"!N vj ] vD Revealed are both the things that are revealed, 
 
 and those that are unrevealed 
 '"Dl imi"6tf p^Q Before the reign of Thy Godhead, &c. &c. 
 
 IV. We shall only briefly touch here, in conclusion, upon 
 the strangely contradictory rabbinical laws framed for the 
 regulation of the intercourse between the two rival nation- 
 alities of Jews and Samaritans in religious and ritual matters ; 
 discrepancies due partly to the ever-shifting phases of their 
 mutual relations, partly to the modifications brought about 
 in the Samaritan creed, and partly to the now less now 
 greater acquiescence of the Jews in the religious state of the 
 Samaritans. Thus we find the older Talmudical authorities 
 disputing whether the Cuthim (Samaritans) are to be con- 
 sidered as "Real Converts" r\i2X "H\3, or only converts 
 through fear — " Lion Converts " mnN WJ — i n allusion to 
 the incident related in 2 K. xvii. 25 (Bala K. 38 ; Kidush. 75, 
 &c). One Rabbi holds >"\^ TTD, "A Samaritan is to be 
 considered as a heathen;" while R. Simon b. Gamaliel — the 
 same whose opinion on the Sam. Pent, we had occasion to 
 quote before — pronounces that they are "to be treated in 
 every respect like Israelites " (Bern. Jer. ix. 2 ; Ketul. 11, 
 &c). It would appear that notwithstanding their rejection 
 of all but the Pentateuch, they had adopted many traditional 
 religious practices from the Jews — principally such as were 
 derived direct from the Books of Moses. It was acknow- 
 ledged that they kept these ordinances with even greater 
 rigour than those from whom they adopted them. The 
 utmost confidence was therefore placed in them for their 
 ritually slaughtering animals, even fowls (Ghul. 4 a) ; their
 
 438 ON THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH. 
 
 wells are pronounced to be conformed to all the conditions 
 prescribed by the Mishnah (Toseph. Mihu. 6 ; comp. Mihw. 
 8, 1). See, however Abodah Zarah (Jer. v. 4). Their un- 
 leavened bread for the Passover is commended (Git. 10; 
 Chul. 4) ; their cheese (Mas. Cuth. 2) ; and even their whole 
 food is allowed to the Jews (Ab. Zar. Jer. v. 4). Compare 
 John iv. 8, where the disciples are reported to have gone 
 into the city of Samaria to buy food. Their testimony was 
 valued in that most stringent matter of the letter of divorce 
 (Mas. Cuth. ii.). They were admitted to the office of circum- 
 cising Jewish boys (Mas. Cuth. i.) — against E. Jehudah, who 
 asserts that they circumcise " in the name of Mount Gerizim" 
 (Abodah Zarah, 43). The criminal law makes no difference 
 whatever between them and the Jews (Mas. Cuth. 2 ; MaTch. 
 8) ; and a Samaritan who strictly adheres to his own special 
 creed is honoured with the title of a Cuthi-Chaber (Gittiu, 
 10 b ; Middah, 33 b). By degrees, however, inhibitions began 
 to be laid upon the use of their wine, vinegar, bread (Mas. 
 Cuth. 2 ; Toseph. 77, 5), &c. This intermediate stage of 
 uncertain and inconsistent treatment, which must have lasted 
 for nearly two centuries, is best characterized by the small 
 rabbinical treatise quoted above — Massecheth Cuthim (2nd 
 ctmt. a.d.) — first edited by Kirchheim (jTOftp 'DO )?2V 
 'O^ttfW) Francf. 1851, — the beginning of which reads : — 
 '• The ways (treatment) of the Cuthim (Samaritans), some- 
 times like Goyim (heathens) sometimes like Israel." No less 
 striking is its conclusion : 
 
 "And why are the Cuthim not permitted to come into the 
 midst of the Jews? Because they have mixed with the 
 priests of the heights" (idolaters). R. Ismael says: "They 
 were at first pious converts (pix H'J = real Israelites), and 
 why is the intercourse with them prohibited? Because of 
 their illegally begotten children, 1 and because they do not 
 fulfil the duties of Qy (marrying the deceased brother's 
 wife);" a law 7 which they understand, as we saw above, to 
 apply to the betrothed only. 
 
 1 The briefest rendering of D^ITOID which we can give — a full explanation 
 of the term wouM exceed our limits.
 
 ON THE SAMAKITAN PENTATEUCH. 439 
 
 " At what period are they to be received (into the Com- 
 munity) ?" " When they abjure the Mount Gerizim, recognise 
 Jerusalem (viz., its superior claims), and believe in the 
 Resurrection." 1 
 
 We hear of their exclusion by R Meir (Chul 6) in the 
 third generation of the Tanaim, and later again under 
 E.. Abbuha, the Amora, at the time of Diocletian ; this time 
 the exclusion was unconditional and final (Jer. Abodah Zarah, 
 5, &c). Partaking of their bread 2 was considered a trans- 
 gression, to be punished like eating the flesh of swine (Zeb. 8, 
 6). The intensity of their mutual hatred, at a later period, 
 is best shown by dicta like that in Meg. 28, 6. " May it 
 never happen to me that I behold a Cuthi." " Whoever 
 receives a Samaritan hospitably in his house, deserves that 
 his children go into exile" (Synh. 104, 1). In Matt. x. 5 
 Samaritans and Gentiles are already mentioned together; 
 and in Luke xvii. 18 the Samaritan is called " a stranger " 
 (aXkoyev/js). The reason for this exclusion is variously given. 
 They are said by some to have used and sold the wine of 
 heathens for sacrificial purposes (Jer. ib.) ; by others they 
 were charged with worshipping the dove sacred to Venus ; 
 an imputation over the correctness of which hangs, up to 
 this moment, a certain mysterious doubt. It has, at all 
 events, never been brought home to them, that they really 
 worshipped this image, although it was certainly seen with 
 them, even by recent travellers. 
 
 1 On this subject the Pent, contains I Samaritan sects believes in the Eesur- 
 nothing explicit. They at first re- ', reetion ; Epiphanius Leontius, Gre- 
 jected that dogma, but adopted it at a ' gory the Great, testify unanimously 
 
 later period, perhaps since Do^itheus ; 
 coinp. the sayings of Jehudda-hadassi 
 and Massudi, that one of the two 
 
 to their former unbelief in this article 
 of their present faith. 
 
 2 na, Lightfoot '• bucella " (?).
 
 ( 440 ) 
 
 xvir. 
 
 THE BOOK OF JASHER. 
 
 A very instructive work might be written on the " Lost 
 Books of the Bible." The number of " biblical " writings 
 that perished must be very considerable indeed. Distinct 
 traces of a great many have survived in our Canon. There 
 is, e.g., the "Book of the Wars of Jehovah," in Numbers. 
 In Kings the " Book of the History of Solomon " is referred 
 to. In Chronicles we are told of histories by Samuel, Nathan 
 the Prophet, Gad the Seer, as sources for the life of David. 
 In the same work there are references for the further history 
 of Solomon to the "Prophecy of the Silonite Ahia," the 
 " Vision of the Seer Jedai (Iddo) on Jeroboam." The Books 
 of the Kings adduce (more than thirty times) certain Annals 
 both of the kings of Judah and of Israel as separate works, 
 speaking of them moreover, under different titles, so as to 
 further favour the belief of the existence of several contem- 
 porary historical compilations. Isajah in his turn is men- 
 tioned as historiographer in Chronicles, where, further, the 
 writings of Shemajah, of Jehu, of Hosai, &c, are spoken of. 
 Of all these productions, great or small, there is no living 
 trace now. They seem, indeed, to have dropped out of man's 
 memory at a very early period. If they gave rise to some 
 moderate discussions it was principally with regard to the 
 possible identity of some of the differently named works. 
 There is, however, one book mentioned in the Bible which 
 people seemed and seem unable ever to forget. And this 
 is the so-called " Book of Jasher." The discussions and 
 vexations, the labours, swindles, and never-ending confusions 
 to which this book has given rise, from the days of the 
 
 1 Re-printed, by permission, from the ' Pall Mall Gazette,' August 7, 1868.
 
 THE BOOK OF JASHER. 441 
 
 Talmud to the most recent Times, invest it with an import- 
 ance which possibly would not have been allotted to it had 
 it survived complete from the first letter to the last. 
 
 To begin with, the name " Book of Jasher " (or Jashar) is, 
 at best, a misnomer. Jashar is not, as far as we know, a 
 proper name. But if it were, it could not be one in this 
 special connection, from grammatical reasons. It is a simple 
 adjective (or noun), and means "upright," "just." Twice 
 this work is distinctly quoted in the Bible : once in Joshua, 
 on the occasion of the battle of Gibeon, and once in Samuel, 
 at the death of Jonathan. On the first occasion it is quoted 
 as containing Joshua's song of victory ; on the second it is 
 referred to for David's dirge. The only reasonable inference 
 to be drawn from both passages seems this, that the book 
 alluded to was a collection of songs composed upon certain 
 events important in national history. Whether it contained, 
 also, a running prose narrative which illustrated these poetical 
 portions is at least doubtful. That it must have existed 
 before the " Eedaction " of the Book of Joshua in its present 
 form : and, further, that it was not completed before the time 
 of David, seems obvious. Also that it must have disappeared 
 at an early period. But it is very strange to see how people 
 of old could not be brought to believe in its loss, in the face 
 of the perfectly recognized fact that innumerable literary 
 treasures had perished before and during the captivity : in 
 the face even of the narrow escape which books like Ezekiel, 
 Proverbs, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, had had from 
 being placed on the Index by the first compilers of the 
 Oanon. The Talmud, in answer to the question, " What 
 is the Book Hayyashar ? " contains many and strange con- 
 jectures proffered by the various Doctors. The passages 
 plainly quoted in the Bible from that book are not even 
 taken as quotations : but, in accordance with some ingeniously 
 found similarities or allusions, it is variously pronounced to 
 mean either Genesis, i.e. the book of "Abraham, Isaac, and 
 Jacob — the Upright Ones," or Deuteronomy, or Judges. The 
 Aramaic version (Targum) translates both times, vaguely, 
 •" Book of the Law," which may mean the Pentateuch or the
 
 442 THE BOOK OF JASHER. 
 
 entire Old Testament. The Vulgate, following the first- 
 named Talmudical opinion (which is also adopted in the 
 "Midrash of Genesis" and by some later authorities), has: 
 the upright ones — " Liber Justorum." The Syriac Version 
 is at variance with itself. By a small orthographical con- 
 trivance the questionable word may be transformed, both in 
 Hebrew and in Syriac, into " song," a word which would be 
 particularly fitting to the probable contents of the book. 
 And so, while in the one passage the Peshito renders Yashar 
 by Ashir, ^substitutes in the other a distinct and different 
 term, viz. " Hymns of Praise." 
 
 Those that came after, the scholiasts and the commen- 
 tators and the critics, found the feast ready prepared. They 
 fell upon these different opinions, appropriated them, modified 
 them, expounded them, played upon them. Whether the 
 word was to be taken in the singular or the plural sense, 
 whether it meant righteous or song, when and by whom the 
 Book was composed, what it contained, whether it was an 
 independent work at all, whether it was intended to designate 
 any, and which, of the twenty-four canonical books — from 
 Genesis to the Minor Prophets — these questions have been 
 ventilated both in the church and in the synagogue with 
 a zeal which is both astounding and instructive. 
 
 It was about the thirteenth century that the opinion 
 began to get whispered abroad among Jewish scholars that 
 the whole quarrel was, as the German proverb has it, about 
 " the Emperor's beard." There was once such a book, some 
 boldly began to pronounce, but that book was lost. And not 
 long after this there appeared, one after the other, no less 
 than three "Books of Jashar" in the field. Let us add at 
 once that only one of these seemed to lay claim (we have 
 failed to discover that it really did so) to the honour of 
 being that long lost work itself. Written in correct, even 
 in elegant Hebrew, this particular book, well known now,, 
 contained the story from the creation of Adam to the time of 
 the Judges. The pre-Mosaic period fills about three-fourths 
 of it, the Mosaic period one-fifth, and a few pages are de- 
 voted to the rest. The Somr of Joshua — a mere mosaic of
 
 THE BOOK OF JASHER. 443 
 
 biblical passages — is given in full ; that of David, however, 
 is not found there. Legends, as well as dates and genea- 
 logies, abound in it, and many an obscure passage in Scrip- 
 ture is explained skilfully. To add to the interest, a cleverly 
 written preface recounted how the book was found by one of 
 Titus's generals, (" bishops," as the Judaeo-German version 
 has it), in the possession of an old man who at the siege of 
 Jerusalem had hidden himself in some cunningly contrived 
 little secret edifice. He had known, he told the general, 
 that the destruction was impending, and he had endeavoured 
 thus to place himself out of harm's reach. He had not only 
 taken with him "brave" eating and drinking, but books 
 rare and precious to while away his time. Need it be said 
 that the general instantly took a fancy to that old man and 
 his books — among which there was this wondrous document 
 — and brought him home to SeviJIa, where he built him a 
 house, " which is to be seen there unto this day " ? 
 
 The book became immensely popular, and it richly de- 
 served its popularity. But, to the grief of the biblio- 
 graphers, it became known, apart from its own famous title, 
 under two other names, which, again, in their turn, belonged 
 to distinct other works. Worse still, when it was first trans- 
 lated (into Judseo-Gernian), a fourth title was given to it — 
 with a special purpose. No one, however, seems to have 
 doubted its authenticity : that is, its being that lost treasure 
 to which Joshua and Samuel referred. Until modern criti- 
 cism looked into the matter and found — shall it be said ? — 
 that it was a clever compilation from the Talmud, from 
 various Midrashim, from Pseudo-Josephus (Josippon), and 
 many popular Jewish and Arabic legends, that it made sus- 
 picious mention of such words as Abilallah, Ali, Mohammed. 
 Abu Jussuf, Emir, Khalif, &c. : all of which things put 
 together led to the irresistible conclusion that it was one of 
 the latest offshoots (the latest, perhaps) of the legendary 
 development known as Midrask, that it arose between the 
 twelfth and thirteenth century a.d., and that its birthplace 
 was Spain. 
 
 But we spoke of three books of that name. Of the two
 
 444 THE BOOK OF JASHER. 
 
 others one appeared under the name of its author, Jacob, 
 called "Tham," of Iiameru, who died in 1171, and who was 
 the most celebrated of the three grandsons of the celebrated 
 Kashi (still falsely called Jarchi). This contains merely- 
 legal matters, or rather Talmudical discussions, and could 
 not, one would have thought, have given rise to any con- 
 fusion. Yet it did. A third book which appeared about 
 one hundred and fifty years later, under the same title, was, 
 again, hopelessly mixed up with it. This was a book of 
 ethics, treating, in eighteen chapters, of topics for pious 
 reflections, such as the creation, worship, faith, repentance, 
 prayer, abstinence, the world to come, death, &c. And, 
 intentionally or not, it was ascribed to the author of the 
 foregoing work : upon whom was then also, intentionally 
 we believe, fathered a certain connection with the above 
 legendary book. Here again modern criticism had to do its 
 work. That last-named ethical work is, there can no longer 
 be any doubt, due to one Zerachiah, " the Greek," and was 
 composed before the end of the fourteenth century. 
 
 So far we have to deal with Hebrew works, every one of 
 which, though a crux to the bibliographer, is of real value 
 and use for the student, as not unworthily representing three 
 great branches of Hebrew literature — the legal, the ethical, 
 and the legendary. 
 
 Three " Books of Jasher,"' however, were not deemed 
 sufficient, it seems. There appeared in the year 1751 a 
 book in London under the title " The Book of Jasher, with 
 testimonies and notes explanatory of the text, to which is 
 [sic] prefixed various readings. Translated into English 
 from Hebrew by Alcuin of Britain, who went a pilgrimage 
 into the Holy Land." A note by Wickliffe is appended, 
 wherein he states that he approves of the book, but does not 
 want it to be made part of the Canon. In the introduction 
 it is related how the book came to England. " I, Alcuin of 
 Britain," it begins, "was minded to travel into the Holy 
 Land and into the Province of Persia in search of Holy 
 things, and to see the wonders of the East, and I took 
 unto me two companions, who learned with me in the
 
 THE BOOK OF JASHER. 445 
 
 University of Oxford all those languages which the 
 people of the East speak, namely, Thomas of Malmesbury 
 and John of Huntingdon ; and though we went as pil- 
 grims, yet we took with us silver and gold and riches. 
 And when we came unto Bristol we went into a ship 
 bound for Rome, where we tarried six months, and learned 
 more perfectly the Persic language." It goes on to relate 
 how they heard of the existence of that long-lost book, 
 and how they came, after many vicissitudes, to the city 
 of Gazna, and then, after endless troubles and bribings 
 (always with " wedges of gold "), they contrived to see the 
 precious manuscript, which was in width "2 foot 3 inches 
 and in length about 9 foot." It was written in a large, 
 clear, and beautiful hand. When, after long and vain 
 attempts on their part, the final permission for the trans- 
 lation was given to them, every precaution had to be used. 
 The three men worked at it for one year and six months 
 (some sixty pages), and, when they had finished, new gold 
 wedges had to be used for the permission of taking away 
 their copy. At last, after an absence of seven years, they 
 returned by way of Ispahan and Eome to Bristol city. 
 While in Rome, Alcuin says, he went to see the Porje, who 
 was then ninety-five years of age, and he showed him this 
 book. The Pope had never heard of it. Then, turning to 
 the places in the Bible which referred to it, he cried out, 
 " I have lived to the age of forgetfulness." ' ; Some years 
 after my arrival," .the preface concludes, "I related this 
 adventure to several, and showed them this work, who 
 advised me not to suffer a copy of it to fall into the hands 
 of the stationer lest I should incur the displeasure of the 
 purple. Being now grown old and infirm, I have left it 
 among other papers to a clergyman in Yorkshire." 
 
 Nothing, indeed, could exceed the utter craziness of this 
 production, which, with its variants, its marginal glosses, its 
 references to and extracts from, works of " Hur " (who again 
 quotes the " Book of Aron "), Phinehas, Othniel, Jazer, 
 Jezer, Zadok, Tobias, and the rest (much in the style of the
 
 446 THE BOOK OF JASHER. 
 
 maddest Gnostic tracts), imposed not merely upon the 
 populace, but upon divines and men of learning. In vain 
 did the Monthly Review of December of that same year, 
 1751, expose it. "The whole," it concludes its criticism, 
 " is so full of blunders, inconsistencies, and absurdities that 
 we think it beneath further notice." In vain was it urged 
 that Gazna was not in Persia; that Alcuin never left 
 Europe; that in the ninth century people did not write 
 modern English ; that the Authorised Version, from which 
 that book was to a great extent almost literally taken, did 
 not exist at the time of Alcuin ; that stationers were not 
 known at that time any more than the " paper on which it 
 is wrote " could have had any existence 300 years before its 
 invention ; that the University of Oxford, where Alcuin had 
 learnt "all the Eastern languages," was not founded till 
 eighty-two years after his death. In vain, also, was it 
 proved by irrefutable evidence that that whole trash was 
 due to one Hive, a half-insane London printer, who in 1733 
 had published an " oration " in which he proved " the plu- 
 rality of worlds," and further asserted that earth was hell, 
 that the souls of men were apostate angels, and that the fire 
 on the day of judgment would be immaterial ; who after 
 this became a public preacher on " infidelity," and hired 
 Carpenters' Hall for his orations, chiefly taken from Tindal. 
 Nay, even the confession of his assistant in the composition 
 of this work, viz. that " they had laboured at it in dead 
 secret," that " the forms were worked off in the night time 
 in a private press-room after the men of the printing-house 
 had left their work," did not prevail. People believed in 
 the book, and here is a specimen of it : — 
 
 " 1. Whilst it was the beginning, darkness overspread the 
 face of nature. 2. And the aether moved : upon the surface 
 of the chaos. 3. And it came to pass that a great light 
 shone forth from the firmament : and enlightened the abyss. 
 4. And the abyss fled before the face of light, and divided 
 between the light and the darkness. 5. So that the face of 
 nature was formed : a second time. ... 13. And it came to
 
 THE BOOK OF JASHER. 447 
 
 pass in the process of time that the man conceived and 
 brought forth Cain," &c. &c. 
 
 Marginal explanations furnished the original " Hebrew " — 
 in English, of course. Thus for '"' beginning " the Hebrew 
 had, it was stated, "the prime;" for nature, "the desert;" 
 for aether, the " atoms ; " for chaos, " confused mass of 
 matter." 
 
 Well, this li chaos," or confused mass of matter, written 
 according to Alcuin-Ilive by Jasher, the son of Caleb, was 
 reprinted at Bristol (apparently in two editions) in 1829. 
 Nearly one thousand of the most '• literary characters," pre- 
 lates, dignitaries, public establishments, the prospectus to the 
 second edition stated, had subscribed to it; and while un- 
 practical Hive had sold his " Editio Princeps " for the modest 
 sum of half-a-crown, his " Bristol pirate " fixed the price at 
 ten shillings, from which it rose to a sovereign. The altera- 
 tions made in the new issue — the editor of which, of course, 
 had never heard of the first publication, though he copied it 
 almost literally from beginning to end — were very charac- 
 teristic. The translation here was stated to have been made 
 in Anglo-Saxon, and to crown the unexampled impudence, 
 reference is made to Alcuin's published works, in which he 
 himself is stated to have spoken of this translation, and 
 where, of course, not one syllable regarding it is to be found. 
 This, no doubt, is the work mentioned by some of the Times 
 recent correspondents. 
 
 The list is not exhausted yet. There is still the " Book 
 of Jasher" by Dr. Donaldson. Of this we would speak, — 
 though, in common with most critics, we are utterly at 
 variance with the ingenious theories propounded in this 
 book, — with very high respect. The attempt has been made 
 here, as our readers probably are aware, to reconstruct Jashar 
 — mosaically, as it were — out of various portions and passages 
 in the Bible. The book, that investigator held, was compiled 
 during the reign of David, as " the first offspring of the pro- 
 phetic schools," and contained, as it were, the marrow of the 
 Old Testament. But on this we shall not enlarge.
 
 448 THE BOOK OF JASHER. 
 
 Thus much of the " Book of Jasher." In the face of the 
 unceasing flow of ingenious correspondence regarding this 
 book, which an accident has again brought into prominence, 
 we have deemed it our duty to enter somewhat fully into the 
 strange vicissitudes of its story. 
 
 In the face of this same correspondence also we thought it 
 better patiently to abide our time till now. 
 
 >
 
 ( 449 ) 
 
 xvii r. 
 
 EARLY ARABIC POETRY. 1 
 
 The traces which have come down to our times of the lite- 
 rature that Arabia possessed during the long period prece- 
 ding the Mohammedan era are of the scantiest description. 
 Yet, as far back as the golden epoch of Hebrew literature, 
 fully sixteen hundred years before the birth of the Prophet, 
 Arab culture must have stood in very high renown. Solo- 
 mon's own transcendent wisdom is likened unto the wisdom 
 of the Arabs ; the Queen of Sheba is an Arab Queen, and 
 Job's wise friends are Arabs. But Islam so completely 
 blotted out all that went before it, that the past with all its 
 mental labour became in reality a " time of ignorance " for 
 succeeding generations. Nothing palpable, nothing reliable 
 at least, has survived that could be ascribed to a period 
 anterior to the fifth century of our own era ; save perhaps a 
 few Himyaritic votive tablets, which there are few to read and 
 fewer still to understand. Nor are the surviving relics in the 
 real " Ishmaelite " Arabic like those of Assyria and Babylon, 
 in which are found treatises on history, astronomy, theology, 
 grammar, poetry, and all the arts and sciences that refined 
 man is heir to. All we have recovered, and are still re- 
 covering, consists of an infinitesimal number of complete 
 poems, and a comparatively larger number of poetical chips, 
 imbedded as quotations in the various writings of the en- 
 lightened ages that followed. 
 
 Small as is their whole sum and substance, they yet prove 
 unmistakably that, brilliant as were the periods of Arabic 
 
 1 Beitrage zur Kenntniss der Poene 
 der alien Amber. Yon Theodor Nol- 
 dekc. Hannover : Eumpler. Re- 
 
 printed by permissii m from the ' Satur- 
 day Review,' June 17, 18G5. 
 
 2 G
 
 450 EARLY ARABIC POETRY. 
 
 literature known to us, none were so brilliant as that of 
 which we have so little knowledge — that immediately pre- 
 ceding Mohammed. Poetry at that time formed the chief 
 glory of an Arab's life. If a poet arose in the midst of a 
 tribe, the other tribes sent embassies of congratulation. There 
 was feasting and dancing, exactly as on those two other 
 proudest occasions of the birth of a young prince or the foal- 
 ing of a noble mare. Mecca, and afterwards Okhad, were the 
 Arabic Olympias where the poets held their contests under 
 the eyes of all the nation. How it was that poetry declined 
 at the very moment when it ought to have lifted up its head 
 more proudly than ever — that an ancient, vast, and glorious 
 literature was irredeemably lost among a people not con- 
 quered, but conquering, not dying, but renewing their strength 
 like the eagle — we cannot here explain. It is essential, 
 however, to bear in mind that all ancient Arabic literature 
 was oral ; that, further, it was all in verse ; and that, finally, 
 the prophet did not like poetry, save his own. And this 
 poetry, of his, except in a few instances where it rises t<> 
 genuine inspiration, is of a mediocre, flat, and wearisome kind.. 
 It was very natural that Mohammed, who appealed to its- 
 superiority as a sign and proof of his divine mission, should 
 hate rivals of his craft, particularly such rivals as might 
 excel or even attack him. And the poets were wont to vex 
 his soul. They wrote the most popular and heart-rending 
 dirges upon those who had fallen fighting against him at 
 Badr. They were occasionally personal, calling him a hum- 
 bug, a madcap, a ridiculous pretender. They laughed at 
 the people of Medina for listening to a mere runaway 
 foreigner. There was particularly one old Jewish lady who 
 wrote squibs on him that cut him to the quick. " By Him 
 in whose hands my soul is," he said to Caab Ibn Malek, 
 " these satires wound me more than arrows." He caused 
 counter-satires to be written, but they failed. Even the 
 '•' sudden visitation " by which some of the worst offenders, 
 men and women, young and old, were found struck to death, 
 did not stop the " press." At last he had a revelation on the 
 subject. " Shall I declare unto you," he asks in the Surah
 
 EAELY ARABIC POETRY. 451 
 
 called " the Poets," " upon whom the devils descend ? They 
 descend upon every lying and wicked person. . . . most of 
 them are liars. And those who err follow the steps of the 
 Poets. Seest thou not how they rove as bereft of their senses 
 through every valley ? " Poetry, in short, as the sole vehicle 
 of all science, all tradition, all religion of the old regime, 
 could not be countenanced by the prophet, except in the one 
 instance of the Book that had lain " hidden under the Divine 
 Throne " until the times were ripe. 
 
 That an ancient literature was wilfully destroyed by fana- 
 tical hands, as has often been asserted, we do not believe ; 
 for nothing can be destroyed wilfully but what exists palpably. 
 Nothing being written down, it could not be torn, burnt, 
 buried out of sight. But, at the same time, tradition is of a 
 delicate nature. Unless constantly tended, watched over 
 carefully, and incessantly repeated, it is apt to be quickly 
 forgotten. Add to tin's that the Arabs, apart from the in- 
 terdict, had better things to do for a time than to repeat the 
 older strains of love and revenge, the tent and desert idyls, 
 the " superstitions " or the stirring deeds of old. A new life 
 more brilliant, more dazzling, than any they had ever dreamed 
 of opened to them. From conquest to conquest, from glory 
 to glory, they went onwards, and the green flag waving aloft, 
 seized upon the golden lands of the Orient. But when to the 
 stormy times of the acquisition under the Ommayads the 
 peaceful times of possession under the Abassides succeeded — 
 when the Caliphs dwelt in fairy palaces, and the rough and 
 simple sons of the desert had exchanged their linen tents for 
 cool and vast marble halls, and the shock of battles was 
 followed by the rich and lazy ease of city life — the hearts of 
 both rulers and ruled began to yearn for the sweet voice of 
 the minstrel. Suddenly, at that juncture, traditions till then 
 unknown came to light, which albeit oral, were considered as 
 genuine as the Koran, the written word itself. " Teach your 
 children the art of poetry," the prophet had said, according 
 to the Sunnah, " for it opens the understanding and maketh 
 valour hereditary." However, the golden time of poetry was 
 not to be recalled by apocryphal traditions any more .than 
 
 2 G 2
 
 452 EARLY ARABIC POETRY. 
 
 by royal edicts and court patronage. Besides, the old Kasida, 
 the only received normal form of poetry, no longer befitted 
 the circumstances. It invariably commenced with a sorrow- 
 ful remembrance of the poet's lady-love, who had gone none 
 knew whither, and the very traces of whose tent, but yester- 
 day gleaming afar in the wide desert-sands, had been effaced 
 over-night. It then drifted off into the praises of the darling 
 camel, the horse, and the sword, by whose aid he would take 
 sure and swift revenge on all his enemies ; and into similar 
 strains, little suited for peaceful dwellers in towns and ham- 
 lets, in gardens and by rivers. New forms, however, were 
 but of slow growth. Thus both rulers and ruled, the golden 
 period having fled, had to put up with the next best thing, 
 the silver period — well enough in its way, but wanting to a 
 great extent in the old simplicity of conception, the genuine, 
 honest sentiment, the whole tone and colour of the grand 
 desert-songs of yore. "With it, however, we have no concern 
 here. 
 
 The golden period, then, of which we have spoken, and in 
 the latter days of which Mohammed lived and died, stretches 
 as far as we can ascertain, over about two hundred years. 
 But slight are the changes which poetry underwent in it both 
 as regards matter and form. As to the additional remnants 
 found, and here published for the first time from MSS. in 
 Leyden, Gotha, and Berlin, by Dr. Noldeke, the greater 
 part of them belongs to the latter, the most important to the 
 earlier, section of that period. The author, so far from merely 
 publishing and editing them, has re-imbedded them in a series 
 of most instructive and readable essays, to which, as a kind 
 of introduction, he has prefixed an interesting chapter on the 
 history of criticism of ancient Arabic poetry. He here dwells 
 chiefly on the difficulties met even by the most experienced 
 investigator on this widely-remote field, where everything 
 looks so wondrous strange. Monotonous as is the life of 
 these old Bedouins, so, at first, appears their poetry. The 
 same string of thought recurs often in the self-same order in 
 the different poets ; a circumstance which has misled some 
 critics into the belief of their being utterly wanting in in-
 
 EABLY ARABIC POETRY. 4o.J 
 
 dividuality. Another drawback is that woefully piecemeal 
 state in which these fragments have come down to us ; a 
 single popular line or stanza being often the sole remnant of 
 long poems. Irrespectively of this, the " Faith " had a hand 
 in them, remodelling or destroying as was deemed fit. There 
 were also some who, aided by the boundless wealth of the 
 Arabic language, deliberately changed words and phrases 
 because they preferred certain others of their own fancy. 
 Thus the outraged Durrumma swears at people who quietly 
 change a word, the finding of which has cost him sleepless 
 nights, for another which is commonplace and of a different 
 quantity; and he strongly recommends writing as a remedy 
 for this evil. A further cause of mischief was the manifold 
 number of versions of single favourite poems; particularly 
 when the schools tried to put them to rights by eliminating 
 what were often the most valuable variations. What had not 
 the imjjrimatur of the savans and the pious was cast aside, 
 and no more heard of. We may add that forgeries in the 
 manner of Ossian were not unusual. Wholesale fatherings 
 upon primeval authorities of productions good, bad, and worse 
 are recorded. The wise men of Kufa, the place of the Koran- 
 scribes which also gave its name to the ancient Kufic char- 
 acter, are recorded to have once sat in full conclave to decide 
 upon the question which ancient authority should be declared 
 the author of a poein they had just heard from a Bedouin. 
 All these difficulties, combined with the absence of vowels 
 and the frequent lack or incorrectness of the diacritical points 
 — not to speak of the crying want of satisfactory works of 
 reference — render this study by no means light and agreeable 
 at first sight. Yet it has its reward. These fragments may 
 be broken, defaced, dimmed, and obscured by fanaticism, 
 ignorance, and neglect, but out of them there arises anew all 
 the freshness, bloom, and glory of desert-song, as out of 
 Homer's epics rise the glowing springtime of humanity and 
 the deep blue heavens of Hellas. It is not a transcendental 
 poetry, rich in deep and thoughtful legend and lore, or 
 glittering in the many-coloured prisms of fancy, but a poetry 
 the chief task of which is to paint life and nature as they
 
 454 EARLY ARABIC POETRY. 
 
 really are; and within its narrow bounds it is magnificent. 
 It is chiefly and characteristically full of manliness, of vigour, 
 and of a chivalrous spirit, doubly striking when compared 
 with the spirit of abjectness and slavery found in some other 
 Asiatic nations. It is wild and vast and monotonous as the 
 yellow seas of its desert solitudes ; it is daring and noble, 
 tender and true. 
 
 One of the most interesting chapters of the book is formed 
 by Ibn Kuteiba's " Introduction to the Poets," hitherto un- 
 edited. This Introduction not only contains many hitherto 
 unknown " chips," introduced by way of specimens, together 
 with a number of shrewd, na'ive, and often caustic remarks of 
 his own, but it evinces also a rough-and-ready kind of eman- 
 cipation on the part of the Arabic litterateur from prejudice 
 and authority, and a quaint soundness of cesthetical judgment 
 in general. He cares not for the time in which the poet 
 lived. "What is in chronology?" he asks. "God made 
 every ancient writer young in his day, and every great man 
 was, by His decree, once a very small man and a mere 
 beginner." As may be expected from this spirit of impar- 
 tiality, he excludes many of those nonentities who somehow 
 have scrambled into a shady nook of Parnassus. Everybody, 
 he argues, has written a poem once in a way. Among the 
 " motive causes " which speed the poet he enumerates Drink- 
 ing, Joy, Wrath, and Love. " They said to Kutayir — How 
 do you manage when writing poetry becomes difficult to you ? 
 He said, ' I w T alk through the deserted habitations and 
 through the blooming greenswards ; then the most perfect 
 songs become easy, and the most beautiful ones flow natu- 
 rally.' " But when the poet's nature has been grieved by 
 bad food or sorrow, everything goes wrong. Alfarazdak said, 
 " I am, according to the judgment of the Tamimites, the 
 best poet among them ; ) r et sometimes an hour 'comes over 
 me when I could rather have a tooth pulled out than make 
 a verse." 
 
 Another of Dr. Noldeke's essays treats of the poems of the 
 Jews in Arabia. How important every fragment relating to 
 the history of Judaism in Arabia — the principal albeit sadly
 
 EARLY ARABIC POETRY. 455 
 
 "troubled source of Mohammedanism — must be to the historian 
 of Islam need not be urged. Yet there is not much to be 
 recovered. Dr. Noldeke is of opinion, and we entirely agree 
 with him, that a great Jewish immigration into Arabia 
 cannot well have taken place before the destruction of Jeru- 
 salem by Titus or Hadrian. The poetry of the Arab Jews, 
 as far as we know it, exhibits, strangely enough, scarcely any 
 special national traits. Not even Biblical or Haggadistic 
 reminiscences are to be met with in their stanzas. They are 
 Arabic pur sang, in style, tone, and contents. They are 
 characterized throughout, according to Dr. Noldeke, by a 
 grand, noble, manly, honest spirit. Assamaual Suba, Aarabi, 
 Garid, are some of the foremost stars of song, not to mention 
 Ivab ben Alasraf, one of Mohammed's bitterest enemies. 
 
 Of all the remnants of primitive Arabic poetry none are 
 more striking, more everlastingly beautiful than the elegies. 
 There is a depth and a simplicity of pathos in the laments of 
 3Iutammim on the death of his brother Malik, who, a re- 
 lapsed convert from Mohammedanism, was cruelly slaugh- 
 tered by Ckalid, Abu Bekr's general, not often met with. 
 Alchansa, 'the most celebrated Arabic poetess, also shines 
 exclusively in elegiac poetry. Her laments over her two 
 murdered brothers, Muawya and Sachr, are most pathetic, 
 tender and passionate ; yet no translation could ever convey 
 the fulness of their beauty ; to be appreciated they must be 
 read in the majestic, soft sonorous words of the original. 
 
 Not the least curious chapter in the book is the last, on 
 the " Bedouins cheating their creditors," containing a number 
 •of mocking-verses on usurers, overreached in cunning by the 
 simple dwellers of the desert. It seems as if all the latent 
 fun of these healthily constituted Arab minds had burst out 
 here. There is a recklessness of humour, and an utter 
 absence of "Philistine" notions of honesty — an absence 
 which Dr. Noldeke endeavours to excuse as best he can — 
 about them, that administer many a shock to our received 
 idea of the permanent gravity and piety of these ancients, 
 but are most essential to the general truthfulness and 
 xounding-ofT of the picture.
 
 456 
 
 EARLY ARABIC POETRY. 
 
 So much for the expression giveD, by the earliest poets 
 known to us among the ancient Arabs, to the comedy and 
 tragedy of their lives. The strains collected together here 
 are but scanty, faint, and broken ; but we recognise in them 
 the full accents of human joy and sorrow, of love and of 
 valour, of passion and of truth. Our best thanks are due to 
 Dr. Noldeke for having undertaken this by no means easy 
 task, and for having performed it with his wonted erudition 
 and industry. 

 
 ( 457 ) 
 
 XIX. 
 
 ARABIC POETRY IN SPAIN AND 
 SICILY. 1 
 
 Perhaps the most interesting period of Arabic history and 
 literature, and the one which has most directly influenced 
 European culture, belongs to the time of the Moorish pos- 
 session of Spain. It is well known how the almost demo- 
 niacal power which, in scarcely two generations after 
 Mohammed, had carried his flag from the Chinese mountains 
 to the Atlantic began to collapse shortly after these gigantic 
 conquests were achieved. The Empire of the Chalifs, more 
 colossal than either the Roman Empire before or the Mon- 
 golian after it, broke down almost simultaneously at its two 
 extreme ends. While in the far-away East, in the hollows 
 of Paropamisus, the primeval banner of Iran was lifted up 
 anew by the Tahirites, the Sheikhs of " Andalus," as all Spain 
 was called, refused to be ruled any longer by the arbitrary 
 governors sent to them from distant Arabia. At the same 
 time, a change of dynasty took place in the heart of the 
 Empire — a change sealed by one of the most dastardly 
 massacres known even in Eastern history. Abu'l Abbas, the 
 first of the new Abbasside rulers, not satisfied with having 
 completely superseded the Omayyads, resolved to stamp 
 them out even to their last trace. Abdallah, the Governor 
 of Damascus, received the order to invite all the scions of 
 the unhappy house of Omayya to a feast, of reconciliation. 
 
 1 " Poesie unci Kunst der Arabei in I printed by permission from the 'Satur- 
 Spanien und Sicilien." Yon A. F. | day Review,' November 17, I81JO. 
 von Schack. Berlin : Hertz. Re-
 
 458 A 1! ABIC POETRY IN SPAIN AND SICILY. 
 
 and goodwill. At that feast, the recital of an appropriate 
 poem having given the signal, they were all, about ninety in 
 number, suddenly fallen upon and murdered. Carpets were 
 drawn over the dying victims, and louder waxed the revel 
 while the hall swam in their blood. Nor did this hecatomb 
 satisfy the enthusiasts of the new era. The royal tombs were 
 opened, and their ashes were given to the w T inds. 
 
 But the star of the Omayyads that had gone down in the 
 East shone forth anew in the West. Abdarrahman, a grand- 
 son of Hisham, had escaped. Of his many and strange 
 adventures during his flight the Arab legend sings and says. 
 At last, in the depths of the African desert, the Andalusian 
 Sheikhs discovered him, and offered him the crown of Spain. 
 In August, 755, he crossed the Straits, and was received in 
 triumph by his new lieges. What internal and external foes 
 there were, he swiftly subdued, and when Eoland had broken 
 his good sword Durenda at Eoncevel, and the forlorn wails of 
 his horn had died away, the last danger that threatened the 
 independence of the realm seemed passed for ever. Soon 
 the new Empire began to outshine all contemporary Europe 
 in power and glory. Cordova, the city chosen as the capital 
 by Abdarrahman, became the crown of Europe. The fame 
 of its greatness and splendour, its hundreds of thousands 
 of marble houses, its three thousand mosques, its twenty- 
 eight suburbs, all thronged with the richest and happiest 
 population under the sun, spread to the end of the world — 
 even to the convent of Gandersheim in Saxony, to Hroswitha 
 the poetess. In the midst of her lay of the martyrdom of 
 St. Pelagius, she bursts forth into a rhapsody about this 
 heathen city, " the brightest splendour of the world." 
 
 If the Abbassides made Bagdad " the Athens of the East," 
 the Omayyads made Cordova the centre of all the science 
 and art of the West. Apart from the capital, schools and 
 academies arose through the length and the breadth of the 
 Peninsula, and students from all parts of the world came to 
 sit at the feet of the great masters of philosophy, mathe- 
 matics, history, medicine, and the rest, who had taken up 
 their abode in that blissful land. The literature that sprang 

 
 ARABIC POETRY IN SPAIN AND SICILY. 459 
 
 up from suck an almost unprecedented movement of mind was 
 enormous. No less than four hundred thousand books, mostly 
 the works of Spanish authors, are recorded to have formed 
 the library of Hakein, one of the later Omayyads, when it 
 was partly destroyed by the Berbers. Six months were 
 required to dispose of those literary treasures that had not 
 perished in the assault. Yet while all branches of literature 
 seem to have been cultivated with nearly equal assiduity and 
 genius, the centre and flower of all was poetry. Abdarrah- 
 man I. himself cultivated the art of song. His stanzas to the 
 palm-tree — which, it is said, he was the first to introduce into 
 Europe, " the land of his exile " — are full of melody and 
 feeling. In the course of centuries the guild of Moorish 
 singers grew to such an extent that the mere names of the 
 most renowned among them would fill volumes. It had in 
 fact come to this, that from the highest to the lowest in the 
 land everybody more or less spoke the language of poetry. 
 Al-Kazwini mentions some place where every peasant pos- 
 sessed the talent of improvisation, and a work still in 
 existence treats specially of the poeticalty gifted kings and 
 nobles of Andalusia. The women in the harems, the officials 
 at their desks, the chroniclers in the bewildering midst of 
 their dates and names, the merchants in their business 
 correspondence — all introduced some poetical scrap or other 
 in their spoken or written speech, if they did not indeed 
 burst out into an independent stanza or two. Poetry was the 
 all-pervading element, without which there seemed to be 
 neither light nor life for these Moors. Nor was it to be 
 feared that the literature of Spain should become one-sided 
 and mannered, or its language corrupted by provincialisms, as 
 Mould have been the case had there been no living contact 
 with the lands of the East, where the well of Arabic flowed 
 pure and undefiled. Not more surely do the literary pro- 
 ductions of our day fly from one corner of civilization to the 
 other than did those works of learning or poetry which had 
 seen the li^ht at the foot of the Sierra Morena or in the 
 valleys of the Indian Caucasus reach the extreme ends of the
 
 460 AEABIC POETKY IN SPAIN AND SICILY. 
 
 Islamic dominions, carried thither by pious pilgrims or well- 
 equipped caravans. 
 
 We have endeavoured 1 to indicate the peculiar cha- 
 racter and tone of the poetry before Mohammed, as prin- 
 cipally represented in the Kasida, the true offspring of 
 the desert. Wild, vague, monotonous, but emphatically 
 tender and passionate, it almost invariably commences 
 with a plaint for the lost love whose tent had been broken 
 up and carried away during the night, then lovingly 
 dwells upon the revenge to be taken by the aid of the 
 swiftest of camels, most valiant of swords, and furthest - 
 reaching of lances, and concludes with maxims of wisdom, 
 expressive of the fleeting nature of life which comes and 
 goes like a dwelling in the desert, while the skies are eternal 
 and the stars will rise and set for ever and ever. Well 
 adapted as were these and similar strains for Beduins, they 
 began to assume a strange incongruousness when these same 
 roving shepherds and robbers had become the kings of the 
 world, dwelling in marble palaces which lay by cool streams, 
 in palm and orange groves. When, therefore, the poets, 
 living in the midst of the most refined and luxurious society 
 of the Europe of the day, regardless of altered circumstances, 
 kept on singing in the orthodox strains of the primitive 
 Muallakat or Hamasa, they were swiftly reminded of the 
 reality of things. The " oft-wept ruins of Chaula's dwelling- 
 place in the yellow sands," Ibn Bessan, a writer of the 
 period, declares to have become rather oppressive. Nor does 
 he believe that much effect will be given to the too frequent 
 summons, " Here let us halt, friends, that we may weep." 
 And as regards the question, " Is tin's the trace of Umm 
 Aufa ? " nobody really could imagine, he says, that the busy 
 winds would have kept the traces of that young lady intact 
 for these many centuries. On the other hand, he suggests 
 that there may be some poetical fields yet unexplored by the 
 ancients, many a graceful thought and pleasing image that 
 
 1 See page 452.
 
 ARABIC POETRY IX SPAIN AND SICILY. 461 
 
 belongs to present springs and summers, preferable perhaps 
 even to those strains which seemed universally accepted 
 chiefly because their authors were long dead and gone. 
 And, slowly but surely, a change did come over Andalusian 
 poetry. Piously embodying many of the old traditions of 
 Beduin thoughts and similes, there was yet a newness of 
 sentiment, a sweet melodiousness, and an almost modern 
 variety pervading it which had been utterly unknown to the 
 olden days. The former passionate outbursts in praise of 
 nature, of love, of hatred, of arms, of animals, become 
 chastened and softened. In the religious strains of this 
 period there is, together with a fervour which at times 
 verges on fanaticism, also perceptible that vague undefinable 
 yearning after the Infinite which is almost a trait of our own 
 day. The elegies and the drinking-songs of those times, 
 their love-strains and their epigrams, are all more or less 
 characteristic of the change. They sing, as was never sung 
 in Arabic before, of nightly boatings by torchlight, of the 
 moon's rays trembling on the waves, of sweet meetings in the 
 depths of rose-gardens, of the Pleiades, of the young cup- 
 bearer, of the King's prowess and generosity, of Spain's 
 glorious cities and rivers, mosques and villas, statuettes and 
 vases, and of the far-away burning desert whence their 
 fathers came. The most successful of these poetical com- 
 positions are generally the brief songs which embody the 
 inspiration of the moment. The longer poems lack, to our 
 Western minds, that unity of plan and execution to which 
 classical models have accustomed us. It is surprising how 
 the Arabs — to whom and to the Jews we owe the preser- 
 vation of the great bulk of antique philosophy and science — 
 should not have profited aught from Greek and Roman 
 poets, with whose works they must surely have come in 
 contact. Their ignorance of them is indeed surprising. Ibn 
 Cbaldun, that most learned and accomplished litterateur, 
 mentions, in support of his assertion that the Persians and 
 Greeks too had great poets, the fact of Aristotle praising 
 Homer, whom he himself only knew from hearsay. The 
 great philosopher, Ibn Roshd's, notion of Greek literature
 
 462 ARABIC POETRY IN SPAIN AND SICILY. 
 
 may be gathered from the fact that he defines Tragedy as 
 "the art of approving," and Comedy as " the art of blaming." 
 And here we are led to a highly intricate question to 
 which attention has repeatedly been drawn of late — namely, 
 the influence of the East and its literature, oral or otherwise, 
 upon mediaeval European literature. Arthur and his whole 
 Hound Table have been traced to the Persian legends of the 
 Court of Kai Khosru or Nushirwan; the prototype of the 
 Graal is found in the cup of Djemjid ; and whether or not 
 these and similar strikingly parallel sagas have arisen inde- 
 pendently of each other, there can be no doubt about many 
 of the choicest gems of European folk-lore being originally 
 Arabic. Yet nothing; can be more absurd than the notions 
 which contemporaneous Europe held about Moorish Spain. 
 Mohammed- is to Turpin a golden idol, guarded by demons, 
 to whom human sacrifices are offered at Cadiz. The old 
 French " Roman de Mahomet " represents him as a baron 
 surrounded by his vassals, possessing the choicest forests, 
 orchards, rivers, and meadows — in the neighbourhood of 
 Mecca! Wolfram von Eschenbach, the Minnesinger of 
 Wartburg memory, relates how one Flegetanis, who knew 
 the coming and going of the stars and their dread influence 
 upon man, had first written the story of the Graal in heathen 
 ( Arabic) characters. Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II., 
 who had studied in Seville, became the hero of a mythic 
 cycle. He had learnt from the Mohammedans what the 
 flight and the singing of the birds betokened, how the dead 
 were to be raised, and where lay the hidden treasures of 
 the earth. Very differently, however, matters stood in the 
 country itself, where, especially towards the end of the 
 Arabic rule, a close connection between Arabs and Christians 
 and their respective civilizations arose — at first in the North 
 — chiefly through the influence of the " Mozarabic " Chris- 
 tians and the Jews. It was the latter principally who, under 
 the auspices of the Arabic dominion, not only produced 
 a brilliant philosophical, astronomical, grammatical, and 
 poetical literature of their own, but also acted as the chief 
 mediators between the antique and the modem, the Eastern 

 
 AEABIC POETRY IN SPAIN AND SICILY. 463 
 
 and Western, civilizations. It is, above all, Toledo which, after 
 its capture by Alphonso IV., became the centre of Orient 
 and Occident, and which therefore figures in the books of the 
 twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the seat of necromancy 
 and magic arts. It was there that young Germans learned 
 the black art under Caesarius of Heisterbach ; there Gherardo 
 of Cremona, Michael Scott, and a host of others, subsequently 
 suspected of all manners of devil's lore, went to study 
 Avicenna, Averroes, and Aristotle done into xirabic. Arabic 
 learning became the common property of the learned world, 
 even as Arabic poetry had long been the common and 
 cherished property of the non-Mohammedan people of Spain, 
 Provence, and even Italy, and remained so down to the 
 terrible fall of Granada — a fall ever to be wept over in the 
 history of Spain, if not of humanity. 
 
 Whether, however, Arabic influence on the contents and 
 form of the romance poetry of Spain, such as we know it, 
 was quite as direct as the author of the work before us thinks 
 — whether, in particular, the two most popular stanzas of 
 Spanish- Arabic poetry, the " Muwashaha " and the " Zad- 
 shal," were grafted, unchanged almost, upon Spanish and 
 Provencal poetry — we shall not here discuss. But there can 
 be no doubt of the existence of most striking reminiscences 
 of Arabic poetry in Perez de Hita's historical romance of the 
 civil wars of Granada, in the cycle of the Cid, and in the 
 different Cancioneros, however similar or dissimilar their 
 metres and the arrangement of their rhymes. Nor is its 
 influence less apparent in early Italian poetry. Jacopo da 
 Todi uses the same form for his Christian hymns which the 
 Arabs used for the praise of Allah. Not a few of the 
 " canzone," " canzonette," and even the "ballatas " of Dante, 
 Petrarca, Boccaccio, exhibit peculiarities of rhyme and metre 
 belonging to the favourite Arabic lyrics. 
 
 Next to Spain, Sicily, which had been subdued by the 
 Arabs after hard and protracted fights at the beginning of the 
 ninth century, claims our attention. But not before the 
 middle of the tenth century, when Palermo became the seat 
 of the Fatimide Governors, do the fruits of the enlightened
 
 4G± ARABIC POETRY IN SPAIN AND SICILY. 
 
 Moorish rule become apparent. It was then first that over 
 the plains which in mythical times had listened to Daphne's 
 shepherd songs, and which afterwards echoed the verses of 
 Stesichoros, Theocritos, and Bion, Semitic poetry lifted up 
 its voice. Grave Emirs who had never heard of the name of 
 .ZEschylus rejoiced in panegyrical Kasidas in the same groves 
 where formerly Prometheus or the Oresteia had moved Hel- 
 lenic hearts, and where Theron of Akragas and his white 
 team, victorious in the hot race, had been immortalised by 
 Pindar. The golden days of Hiero of Syracuse seemed 
 to have arisen once more, and the voice of song was heard 
 in the palace and in the fields. Even when the Moslem 
 power was broken, Roger and! his Norman knights tried to 
 perpetuate the culture of the conquered race. Their arts 
 and sciences, their manners and customs, became the coveted 
 inheritance of the conquerors. The kings of the House of 
 Hauteville copied their pageants and the ceremonial of their 
 whole royal household from the Arabs. Arabic were their 
 coins, Arabic was their era, Arabic, nay Koranic, the mottoes 
 and devices which they publicly adopted. Their palaces 
 were not inaugurated in the name of the Trinity, but in that 
 of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate. William the 
 Good was, outwardly at least, much more of a Mohammedan 
 than a Christian; and of Eoger of Sicily, Monk Eadmer, his 
 contemporary, relates that he never allowed a Moslem to 
 embrace Christianity- — " from what reason I know not, but 
 God will judge him." Regarding Sicilian poetry, there is 
 nothing specially characteristic in what has remained to 
 distinguish it from the Spanish poetry of which we have 
 spoken ; except perhaps that to us, upon whom classical 
 reminiscences would come crowding at every step, the utter 
 absence of the slightest allusion to Proserpina, to Poly- 
 phemus, to Arethusa, and the rest, is somewhat strange, as 
 strange as the constant allusions to gazelles and camels in 
 Sicily, which never harboured any. There is, however, one 
 unmistakable trait in most of these songs — namely, a certain 
 voluptuous softness which seems indigenous to the island 
 itself.
 
 AEABIC POETRY IN SPAIN AND SICILY. 465 
 
 Of these and other topics connected with the Arabic rule 
 in Europe the work before us pleasantly, though somewhat 
 too rapturously, discourses. Its chief merit, however, seems 
 to us to lie in the translations of the poems with which it is 
 richly studded. The whole history of Spanish- Arabic poetry 
 has hitherto lain fallow, and this first attempt bodily to 
 transplant some of its half-Eastern, half- Western, flowers into 
 German soil deserves to be heartily encouraged. Herr von 
 Schack has in many instances been peculiarly happy in the 
 execution of his task. The whole tone and texture of these 
 strange songs is often reproduced with a faithfulness remind- 
 ing us of Ruckert himself. In the face of the copious modern 
 literature on the subject there seemed to be less occasion for 
 the essays on Moorish art contained in the book, but they 
 too give ample evidence of careful study, worthy of the 
 author and his labour of love. 
 
 LONDON : PRINTED BT WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET, 
 AKD CHARING CROSS. 
 
 2 H
 
 n
 
 
 • JOtV 
 
 Ccc 
 
 
 ■::«<Xr, 
 
 ex 
 
 ' ex 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This hook is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 Form L9-Series4939 
 
 S<§£? 
 
 S<s^x 
 
 «s? 
 
 t «3 
 
 
 5 <" «< 
 
 
 crc«r
 
 -.V_-V-.-~>-r •• 
 
 
 SK5 
 
 L 007 661 821 4 
 
 cc 
 
 m cc_ 
 
 3 C.V 
 
 
 
 <£ <L C 
 
 r cc 
 
 c cc 
 c cc c 
 
 C ''C c 
 
 C C ^< 
 
 <: " C " 
 eg 
 ■ 
 
 C C cc 
 C C <C 
 
 C < S 
 
 * C C < 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 000 733 017 8 

 
 
 ^JB 
 
 
 ^3 
 
 ^ > OLm 
 
 . -> 2> 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■'■■■^■•X>.^>3^-L-