.

while as covenanted. The common reader ought to have the benefit of an identity of phrasing where this identity is necessary in order to identify the thing or person meant.

The priest's lips should keep knowledge, that the people may seek the law at his mouth. In 1870 priests awoke to this truth. The Convocation of Canterbury, the oldest synod in English speaking Christendom, appointed a Committee to revise the current version of the Scriptures. This Committee was to make no change for the sake of change. It was not to desert the style of the English Bible. It was to invite the coöperation of Biblical scholars of different nations and creeds, and was to give ten years to the important project. Eight of these ten years have elapsed. Scholars of this country, as well as scholars of Great Britain, are engaged in the work. What will be the issue? The Latin version of the Scriptures, made by Jerome, was for a thousand years the standard Bible of Western Christendom. Yet the making of it was earnestly opposed, and the work did not establish itself in general acceptance for two centuries. May the Revision at present in progress meet with earlier success: may Christian people give the work the benefit of their prayers, and when it appears give the book a candid reception!

THE HEBREW TEXT OF THE OLD TESTA

MENT.

BY HOWARD OSGOOD, D.D.,

Professor of Hebrew, in Rochester Theological Seminary.

THE HISTORY OF THE TEXT.-The Hebrew text, as we now find it in the best editions of the Old Testament, is a reprint, with few and slight exceptions, of the text edited by Jewish scholars, and printed by Bomberg, at Venice, in 1525, and reprinted by him, with corrections, in 1547. In some of the subsequent editions of the text, a few manuscripts and the preceding printed editions were compared, and errors corrected; but until the latter part of the last century there was no text published which was founded upon a large comparison of manuscripts.

Bomberg's Hebrew text was accompanied by Rabbinic commentaries, and was designed for the use of the Jews, since few Christians at that day understood Hebrew, and still fewer were acquainted with Rabbinic. This text enjoys the great advantage of being acknowledged as the received text by Jews and Christians alike. That it is worthy of great confidence is the united testimony of critics, and one of the latest and most learned, Strack, makes stronger statements in favor of the preservation of the correct reading in this text than some of his predecessors, or than is welcome to some who cannot but admire his preeminent ability and learning.

We do not know what or how many manuscripts were used by the editors of this text, but from the preface to the Bible of 1525, and from the carefulness

in editing, we are assured that the principal editor, Jacob ben Chayim, was as thoroughly skilled in the text as in the then known various readings; and that he was as reverent to the text as he was learned. Whatever manuscripts were used, they were in all probability of a late date, written under the strict and microscopic rules of the Talmud, and accompanied with the various readings of the Masorites. In respect to age, no extant Hebrew manuscript can compare with the Sinaitic and Vatican Greek manuscripts; and yet, in verification of the text, the Hebrew possesses a line of witnesses that extends a long way down the centuries, and who have sought to guard the text with scrupulous

care.

When the privileges of the great Jewish schools in Babylonia were restricted by the Persian kings, and the greater part of the Talmud had been collected, the intense activity of the Jewish brain, and Jewish devotion to the very letter of the word, were directed to the notation of all diversities in the traditional reading of the text, as to consonants, vowels, accents, words, the commencement and close of verses and divisions of the text, as well as to any unusual marks found in manuscripts. They marked with all care mistakes in any of these points, but never altered the text. Even where the mistake was evident and trivial-a letter slightly out of place, or upside down, or too small, or too large, or a variation in the writing of a word—they did not presume to change the text. This honest dealing with the text is represented in our Bibles to-day by the continuance of the mistake and its attendant corrective margin. These textual criticisms were originally contained in separate works, but were afterwards transferred to the margin of the manuscripts of

the Hebrew Old Testament, and by the labors of scholars of our day they are again being collected and published in separate works.

In the era of the Talmudists, before A.D. 500, very strict rules were enjoined upon copyists. These rules cover all the minutiae of composition, and reveal a method of dealing with the text that must have been traditional. The attention the Talmudists themselves bestowed upon the text is shown by their enumeration of the verses, words and letters of each book, and their designation of the middle verse, word and letter of the book.

Within this same period Jerome, in his translation, corrects renderings of the Septuagint, and gives us a faithful representation of the text then received in Palestine. No large additions or defections from that text are found in our own.

The boast of Josephus, that " during so many ages as have already passed no one has been so bold as either to add anything to them" (the sacred books), "to take anything from them, or to make any change in them," seems to be justified by the minute traditional rules and carefulness of the later Jews.

All this shows us that for fifteen centuries, at least, it was a religious duty with the Jews to preserve, with all exactness, the sacred text as received by them: a duty which they zealously sought to perform. When the Hebrew language was unknown by Christians, when the Jew was under the harrow of unresting persecution and his name a byword, he was with patient fidelity keeping watch over the text, unknown to all but himself, and preserving a priceless inheritance for the coming centuries. As respects the Hebrew text, "Japheth dwells in the tents of Shem."

THE ACCURACY OF THE PRESENT TEXT.-That there are passages where the text has suffered from wrong transcription, where there are insuperable difficulties or slight mistakes, where manuscripts differ, and versions give a rendering at variance with the present text, is well known to every Hebrew scholar. If with the superior advantages of the printing press for the maintenance of a given text, with our Bible societies and multitudes of critical readers of the English Bible, we have not preserved one and the same text in all the editions, is it a matter of astonishment that manuscripts vary? Is it not a matter of greater astonishment if they agree in most respects, written, as they were, centuries apart? But these places where error has crept in are by no means so numerous as some critics would have us believe. Dr. S. Davidson, a very competent critic, in his "Revision of the Hebrew Text," cites between seven and eight thousand places where manuscripts and versions differ from our text. These changes, for the far greater part, refer to the different modes of writing or accentuating the same word; they include the thousand or more marginal notes of the Jewish medieval scholars, the changes of the vowel by the accent, etc.

The Old Testament contains more than three times as much text as the New Testament, and if we put the diversities of readings in the Old Testament at ten thousand, still this would be but one-fifteenth as many as those found in the manuscripts of the New Testament. As the one hundred and fifty thousand various readings of the New Testament dwindle to a comparatively very small number when you apply the touchstone of a change of signification, so the Old Testament ten thousand dwindle at the same test. It should be