LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Gl FT OF 
 
 ( 
 
 Class 
 
ISRAEL: 
 
 OR 
 
 JACOB'S NEW NAME 
 
 A STUDY BY 
 
 EDWARD PAYSON VINING 
 
 Showing that the Meaning of the Name 
 
 And the Use of Cognate Words 
 Furnish Several Convincing Proofs 
 
 Of the Historicity of 
 
 The Biblical Record Concerning Him 
 
 And of the Early Date of 
 
 The Pentateuch 
 
 Reprinted from 
 
 "WATCHWORD and TRUTH/' 
 
 AMERICA PRINTING COMPANY 
 
 8 DIX PLACE, BOSTON. MASSACHUSETTS 
 
 1908 
 
A 
 
 "A man of brutishness does not see; 
 And a dullard does not discern; 
 In disturbers sprouting like grass, 
 "And all evil-doers flourishing; 
 That [they are] to be silenced unto 
 
 eternity. 
 But Thou art on high forever, O 
 
 Lord : 
 
 For, lo, Thy foes, O Lord, 
 For, lo, Thy foes shall perish ; 
 All evil-doers shall be scattered." 
 
 Psalm xcii, 6-9. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The preparation of a series of ar- 
 ticles for "Watchword and Truth" 
 in regard to the nature and pur- 
 poses of prayer, as these are de- 
 scribed in the Scriptures, led to an 
 examination of the passage ren- 
 dered in our accepted version of 
 the Bible: 
 
 "Thy name shall be called no 
 more Jacob, but Israel : for as a 
 prince hast thou power with Gocl 
 and with men, and hast prevailed." 
 
 A careful study of the exact 
 meaning, and consequent applica- 
 bility, of Jacob's new name in- 
 volved a similar examination of. the 
 use and force of the cognate He- 
 
iv Preface 
 
 brew words derived from its char- 
 acteristic root SaR; and this in turn 
 led to unexpected discoveries, of 
 such importance that it seems de- 
 sirable to make them known. 
 
 Two facts are evident at the first 
 glance at the name; these being 
 that its terminal syllable EL is the 
 appellation of the Divinity, arid that 
 the remainder of the word is a short^ 
 ened form of a verb in what is 
 sometimes improperly called the 
 future tense. The common opinion, 
 that the meaning of the name is 
 "Warrior of God," is therefore 
 wholly inadmissible ; for a verb can- 
 not be properly translated by a 
 noun. It is true that some eminent 
 grammarians have invented a noun 
 ISRaH to account for the first por- 
 tion of the appellation; and to this 
 creation of their fancy they have 
 attributed the meaning "Wa.irior or 
 soldier;" but this was merely the 
 result of an effort to support a false 
 rendering, which without it would 
 have stood self-condemned. The 
 
Preface v 
 
 truth is, that no such noun is to be 
 found in the Hebrew language, and 
 that there is no reason to think that 
 the alleged word ever had an actual 
 existence. 
 
 Of late years there has, therefore, 
 been a tendency to admit the verbal 
 force of the first two syllables of 
 the name; but this has been accom- 
 panied by the claim that the pri- 
 mary meaning of the verb is "to 
 war," from which it has been soft- 
 ened into "to contend, or to strive" ; 
 this claim being supported by com- 
 paring it with an Arabic word of 
 similar form, which is alleged to 
 have the latter meaning. This was 
 the view taken by our recent re- 
 visers. 
 
 The fact is, however, that the 
 two verbs Hebrew and Arabic 
 can not be considered cognate, 
 without a violation of one of the 
 most fundamental rules of philol- 
 ogy; and that the Arabic word in 
 question means "to wrangle," and 
 is not in any way applicable to 
 
vi Preface 
 
 physical strife. The Hebrew verb, 
 moreover, has in it no thought of 
 warfare, strife or contention of any 
 kind. 
 
 It is shown in the course of this 
 work, that its primary meaning is 
 "to set in order, or to arrange." 
 The usual method of setting a body 
 of men in order is by means of a 
 command given by their recognized 
 leader, and such a command is fre- 
 quently described in the English 
 language as an "order." In pre- 
 cisely the same way, the Hebrew 
 word which first meant "to order" 
 (that is to say, "to set in order"), 
 developed the secondary meaning 
 "to order," that is to say, "to com- 
 mand." 
 
 The tense of the verbal portion 
 of Jacob's new name regards the 
 action as continuing or recurring 
 and, therefore, as not brought to an 
 end. Hence, it is frequently em- 
 ployed to express a permanent con- 
 dition, existing unchanged through 
 past, present and future: a Hebrew 
 
Preface vii 
 
 verb of this kind is therefore prop- 
 erly represented by its correspond- 
 ing English verb in the present 
 tense. Hence the plain and simple 
 meaning of the name Israel is 
 "God commands," or, giving the 
 Jussive force to the shortened form 
 of the verb, it may be translated 
 "Let God command." 
 
 As soon as the true force of this 
 appellation is recognized, it at once 
 becomes evident that this was the 
 name of a man, formed in the same 
 way as some forty other personal 
 names ; and that it never could have 
 become the designation of a body 
 of people, otherwise than through 
 their descent from an ancestor who 
 was so called. 
 
 This fact immediately disposes 
 of the skeptical theory that the his- 
 tory of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob 
 is mythical, and that no such men 
 ever existed. 
 
 Moreover, the study of the He- 
 brew words derived from the root 
 SaR, which appears in the name 
 
viii Preface 
 
 I-SRa-EL, led to the discovery that 
 they present four additional proofs 
 of the historicity and early date of 
 the Pentateuch. 
 
 In brief, these are as follows: 
 First, the noun SaR, "Command- 
 er," had a gradual growth of mean- 
 ing, and was used in Genesis and 
 the first chapters of Exodus in a 
 sense in which it was never em- 
 ployed after the days of Moses. 
 Second : the corresponding feminine 
 noun SaRaH was in use at least as 
 early as the times of Deborah; but 
 Genesis has an archaic form SaRal, 
 which is necessarily much older. 
 Third, the demand of the Semitic 
 languages for triconsonantal stems 
 for their verbs resulted in several 
 different methods of forming such 
 stems from biliteral roots. In this 
 case three different forms of what 
 is essentially the same verb (for 
 they all have the common meaning 
 "to command") were developed 
 from the root SaR. In Genesis we 
 find the form SaRaH (similar to 
 
Preface ix 
 
 that of the feminine noun), which 
 occurs only in that book, except for 
 a single case, in which Hosea 
 quoted the word from Genesis, and 
 then, fearing it would not be under- 
 stood by the people for whom he 
 wrote, repeated the statement in the 
 dialect of his own day, using the 
 form SWuR as its equivalent. This 
 last-mentioned form seems to have 
 been peculiar to the northern king- 
 dom ; and even there it died out of 
 use soon afterward; so that thence- 
 forth SaRaR was the form univer- 
 sally employed. He who in the 
 face of facts like these contends 
 that the Pentateuch, or any of the 
 earlier documents from which it is 
 alleged that the Book of Genesis 
 was compiled, was written in 
 Hosea's country, at or not long 1 oe- 
 fore his times, must indeed be blind 
 and deaf to all evidence. Fourth, 
 the form SaRaH was much older 
 than SWuR; yet even the latter 
 was so archaic that at the time of 
 the return from Babylon it had be- 
 
x Preface 
 
 come entirely obsolete, and the 
 wisest of the Hebrew scholars of 
 that time did not understand its 
 meaning. Hence, in each case of 
 its occurrence, they attributed to it 
 a different force from that which 
 they assigned to it anywhere else: 
 with the result that two important 
 passages of the Bible have been 
 grossly perverted from their real 
 meaning, and have always been 
 most dreadfully mistranslated. 
 
 It is to the exposition of the true 
 meaning of these Biblical state- 
 ments that the closing chapters of 
 this little book are devoted. 
 
 The method herein employed, for 
 determining the dates to which the 
 various books of the Bible should 
 be attributed, opens up a new field 
 for research; and the important 
 results following the careful study 
 of a single Hebrew root indicate 
 that a complete investigation of this 
 nature must prove very fruitful. 
 
 As a single additional example, it 
 may be noticed that the verb "to 
 
Preface xi 
 
 laugh" (derisively or sportively) 
 was written TzaChaQ in the Pen- 
 tateuch ; that in the Book of Judges 
 it was once given that form, and 
 once was written SaChaQ ; and that 
 this latter form universally pre- 
 vailed thereafter. 
 
 From this fact the conclusion fol- 
 lows, that Isaac was given his 
 name of YiTzChaQ, and that his 
 history was written, not later than 
 the time of the Judges ; since at any 
 later date his name would have been 
 spelled YiSChaQ ; a form in which 
 it in fact appears in the one hundred 
 and fifth Psalm, in Jeremiah and in 
 Amos. 
 
 For detailed proof of the truth 
 of the various statements herein 
 made, and for further information 
 upon the subject, the reader is re- 
 ferred to the chapters which follow. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 I. JACOB'S CONVERSION . . 13 
 
 II. THE TITLE SAR . . , 32 
 
 III. THE MYTHICAL THEORY . 47 
 " THE MEANING OF THE NAME 55 
 
 IV. THE TITLE IN OTHER TONGUES 65 
 V. THE DATE OF GENESIS . 82 
 
 VI. A CHANGE OF LANGUAGE . 98 
 
 VII. DAVID'S CAPTIVES . 117 
 
 VIII. THE ORIGINAL RECORD . 133 
 
 IX. THE WORK OF THE CAPTIVES 151 
 
 X. JUSTICE TO DAVID . . 171 
 
 EPILOGUE . . .191 
 
ISRAEL: 
 
 OR JACOB'S NEW NAME 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 Jacob's Conversion 
 
 Up to the time that Jacob 
 crossed the river Jabbok, on his 
 hasty flight from Paddan-aram to 
 his own native land, one of the most 
 distinctive features of his character 
 was a lack of faith in God, com- 
 bined with a shrewd cunning in 
 scheming for his own welfare, re- 
 gardless of the rights of others. 
 Jehovah had assured Rebekah that, 
 of the two peoples who should de- 
 scend from her the elder should 
 serve the younger; but this promise 
 was not sufficient to satisfy either 
 Jacob or his mother ; so they formed 
 
14 Jacobs New Name 
 
 deep-laid plots to obtain for 
 the younger son the rights of the 
 first-born, and resorted, not only to 
 hardness and keenness in bargain- 
 ing, but also to deceit and false- 
 hood. 
 
 When fleeing from his father's 
 home, to escape from his brother's 
 wrath, Jehovah appeared to him, 
 and promised to keep him whither- 
 soever he went; but this again did 
 not prevent him from resorting to 
 cunning devices of his own to get 
 the best of his father-in-law. As 
 this resulted in alienation of heart, 
 the Lord commanded Jacob to re- 
 turn to his native land; and to the 
 promise previously given, that Ja- 
 cob and his seed should possess the 
 land, and that he should be kept, 
 the further assurance, "I will be 
 with thee," was added. But Ja- 
 cob's heart failed him as he drew 
 toward his early home, and his 
 shrewdness was again called into 
 play as a means of appeasing 
 Esau's anger. 
 
Jacob's Conversion 15 
 
 First, he sent messengers to re- 
 port to his brother that he was re- 
 turning rich, and desired reconcil- 
 iation; but the only answer he re- 
 ceived was the information that 
 Esau was coming to meet him with 
 a band of four hundred men. He 
 began now to realize that his bro- 
 ther had just cause for resentment, 
 and that, after all, it was God's 
 blessing, and not his own shrewd- 
 ness, that had made him rich. Yet 
 the mercy which had been shown 
 to him in the past did not lead him 
 to rely confidently upon God's 
 promise for the future ; and, great- 
 ly afraid and distressed, he divid- 
 ed his people and possessions into 
 two separate companies, so that, if 
 one was smitten, the other might 
 escape. Then he sent Esau large 
 and valuable presents of the ani- 
 mals which constituted the wealth 
 of that time, dividing them into a 
 number of droves, and sending 
 them forward one at a tinre, with 
 a space between each two droves; 
 
16 Jacob's New Name 
 
 hoping that the repetition of one 
 present after another might pla- 
 cate his brother. 
 
 Yet it seems evident that these 
 plans would have failed, if it were 
 not for God's interposition. The 
 one thing that finally allayed 
 Esau's anger appears, beyond all 
 question, to have been Jacob's crip- 
 pled condition, at the sight of which 
 his brother's memory abandoned 
 all recollection off chicanery, and 
 turned back to the times when the 
 little lad named Jacob, the weaker 
 and less adventurous of the twins, 
 had been cared for and protected 
 from harm by his stronger and more 
 active brother. Very possibly there 
 was a remembrance of some time 
 in their youthful days when little 
 Jacob had limped, because of a tem- 
 porary injury, and had been helped 
 and supported by his brother. 
 
 So, as Jacob now advanced, "halt- 
 ing upon his thigh," "Esau ran to 
 meet him, and embraced him; and 
 they wept." 
 
Jacob's Conversion 17 
 
 But before this reconciliation 
 could be brought about, it was ne- 
 cessary that Jacob should be led 
 to give up his old self-will, and 
 should surrender completely to his 
 God. It had therefore come to pass 
 that, at the time when he had first 
 begun to realize his own weakness 
 and unworthiness, and the inade- 
 quacy of all his schemes ; at the 
 time that his heart was filled with 
 the most anxious foreboding as to 
 his future : "Jacob was left alone ; 
 and a man struggled in the dust 
 with him until the rising of the 
 dawn. And he saw that he was not 
 able for him, and he touched the 
 hollow of his thigh ; and the hollow 
 of Jacob's thigh shrank away in his 
 struggling in the dust with him. 
 And he said, 'Send me away, for the 
 dawn has risen' ; and he said, 'I will 
 not send thee away, except thou 
 bless me.' And he said unto him, 
 'What is thy name?' And he said, 
 'Jacob.' And he said, 'Not Jacob 
 shall they name be called hereafter, 
 
1 8 Jacob's New Name 
 
 but Israel; for thou hast command- 
 ed with God and with men, and 
 hast been able.' " 
 
 "And Jacob desired, and said, 
 Tell, pray, thy name.' And he said, 
 Wherefore dost thou thus desire 
 for my name? And he blessed him 
 there." 
 
 "And Jacob called the name of 
 the place Peniel (That is, The face 
 of God') : 'For I have seen God 
 face to face, and my soul has been 
 delivered!'" 
 
 The foregoing is an exact, word 
 -for-word, reproduction of the He- 
 brew record, and although the syn- 
 tax is Hebrew, rather than English, 
 yet it is sufficiently intelligible. The 
 difficulty in regard to expressing 
 the thought in smoother and more 
 classical English is, that in the at- 
 tempt so to do, it is almost im- 
 possible to avoid an admixture of 
 a human element; as can readily be 
 seen by examining the passage in 
 our current versions. 
 
 The most important differences 
 
Jacob's Conversion 19 
 
 have been italicized, above; and 
 these will now be examined. Let 
 us first take up the final clause: 
 "My soul has been delivered." The 
 Hebrew conception of the vital prin- 
 ciple, which they called NePheSh, 
 was not in all respects identical 
 with ours in regard to the "soul." 
 Like the Greek psyche, this word 
 must often be translated "life"; yet 
 it still further resembles the Greek 
 term by being the only word that 
 the language furnishes for use 
 when "soul" is meant. It is em- 
 ployed with substantially this 
 meaning in the following passages 
 of Genesis, among others. 
 
 "I will eat of my son's venison, 
 that my soul may bless thee." 
 
 "We saw the distress of his soul, 
 when he besought us." 
 
 "O my soul, come not thou into 
 their council." 
 
 Such doubt as might exist in re- 
 gard to the meaning of this word 
 in the passage under consideration 
 is instantly removed by the nature 
 
2o Jacob's New Name 
 
 of the verb that was employed in 
 connection with it; for although 
 this occurs more than two hundred 
 times in the Old Testament, it is 
 never translated elsewhere "to pre- 
 serve"; but usually "to deliver"; 
 with "to rescue," or "to escape," 
 as alternatives. Its fundamental 
 meaning is "to draw out," and the 
 thought is usually implied that it 
 is from a dangerous or undesirable 
 condition. This very chapter re- 
 cords that Jacob prayed, "Deliver 
 me, I pray thee, from the hand of 
 my brother." 
 
 In his last sickness, Israel laid 
 his hands upon the heads of his 
 grandchildren Ephraim and Manas- 
 seh and said, "The angel which 
 redeemed me from all evil, bless 
 the lads." His heavenly visitant is 
 similarly described in Hosea xii, 4, 
 as an "angel;" and there was no 
 other occasion than this to which 
 Israel can well be thought to have 
 referred. 
 
Jacob's Conversion 21 
 
 An exact translation of the word 
 describing the nature of the con- 
 flict assists in determining the true 
 result. The phrase, "There wres- 
 tled a man with him until the 
 breaking of the day," gives the im- 
 pression that the two antagonists 
 were about equal in strength, and 
 that Jacob held his own. It is no- 
 ticeable, however, that the Hebrew 
 text does not employ the word pro- 
 perly meaning "to wrestle," which 
 occurs in Genesis xxx, 8, where it 
 is stated that Rachel said, "With 
 wrestlings of God did he wrestle 
 with my sister;" but uses another 
 term that is not found elsewhere 
 in Scripture; this is the word mean- 
 ing "dust," which here alone is given 
 the form and power of a verb. 
 The exact English equivalent of 
 the Hebrew expression is that the 
 visitor "dusted" with Jacob; and 
 the meaning clearly is, that he 
 struggled in the dust with him. 
 This shows at once, however, that 
 the two were not standing erect as 
 
22 Jacob's New Name 
 
 they struggled together; but that 
 the angel laid Jacob in the dust. 
 Yet, although there was no difficul- 
 ty in thus throwing Jacob to the 
 ground, he would not yield; pros- 
 trate though he was, he still contin- 
 ued to struggle. 
 
 The account goes on to state, 
 that the heavenly visitant s,aw the 
 he was not able for Jacob. What it 
 was that he was not able to do is 
 not stated, but is left to be inferred 
 from the context. It should be par- 
 ticularly noticed that the statement 
 is not made, that the angel was not 
 able to outwrestle Jacob, and thus 
 prevail against him; for the truth 
 is that it is clearly revealed that he 
 did this in the beginning of the 
 struggle. Let us remember, that 
 there is just one thing at which 
 the power of God stops short, lim- 
 ited by the conditions which He 
 imposes upon Himself, and that is, 
 that He never forces the submis- 
 sion of a human will. The yielding 
 must be voluntary, or it can not be 
 
Jacob's Conversion 23 
 
 accepted. What the angel could 
 not do, was to force Jacob to yield 
 himself up to a power greater than 
 his own. Throughout his life he 
 had been masterful; going his own 
 way. Now, though prostrate and 
 powerless to rise, he still could, and 
 would, struggle. So, for the sal- 
 vation of his soul, as well as for 
 the preservation of his life from 
 the vengeance threatened by Esau, 
 the angel "touched the hollow of 
 his thigh ; and the hollow of Jacob's 
 thigh shrank away, in his strug- 
 gling in the dust with him." 
 
 The action of the thigh is ex- 
 pressed by a verb, which in its us- 
 ual form means "to force in." It 
 is generally employed to describe 
 blowing a blast into (and through) 
 a trumpet, or thrusting a sword into 
 the flesh, or driving a nail or a peg 
 into something. Slightly modified, 
 as in this case, it is used to express 
 alienation of heart a turning 
 away, a shrinking away from an- 
 other, with aversion. The Biblical 
 
24 Jacob's New Name 
 
 statement is that Jacob's thigh 
 forced itself in, or back; an action 
 which "shrank away" describes 
 quite accurately. That this is the 
 true translation is shown by verse 
 32, which the King James version 
 renders: "Therefore the children 
 of Israel eat not of the sinew which 
 shrank, which is upon the hollow 
 of the thigh, unto this day; because 
 he touched the hollow of Jacob's 
 thigh in the sinew that shrank." 
 
 The word rendered "shrank" is 
 an adjective, derived from the verb 
 meaning "to forget." Strictly 
 speaking, the Bible describes the 
 affected part as "the forgetful mus- 
 cle;" that is to say, as the muscle 
 which forgot or neglected to per- 
 form its proper function; a muscle 
 that was more or less paralyzed. 
 The revisers substituted the word 
 "hip" for "shrank;" but a deriva- 
 tion of the term trom the word 
 meaning "hip" is almost impossi- 
 ble; and it should also be remem- 
 bered that the Bible clearly and 
 
Jacob's Conversion 25 
 
 sharply discriminates between the 
 hip and the thigh. See Judges xv, 
 8: "And he smote them hip and 
 thigh/' 
 
 Jacob had already come to some 
 realization of his unworthiness, 
 and of his dangerous condition. He 
 now learned his powerlessness. 
 Further resistance was impossible; 
 and he knew that the antagonist at 
 whose touch his muscle had 
 shrunk away could not only now 
 do with him as he would, but that 
 he could also have done so at the 
 beginning of the struggle, or at any 
 time that he desired during its con- 
 tinuance. It was only by Divine 
 forbearance that his life had been 
 spared. As he realized this, the 
 man who had always domineered, 
 dictated, and perversely gone his 
 own way, broke down and sur- 
 rendered, finally and completely. 
 Henceforth he could expect no 
 good to come to him from his own 
 scheming and planning. Hereafter 
 he could find prosperity only in the 
 
26 Jacob's New Name 
 
 blessing of his God ; to Him, there- 
 fore, he resolved to cling. 
 
 A most typical conversion is that 
 here described. Hosea, adding to 
 the information given in Genesis, 
 tells us that Jacob "wept and made 
 supplication to Him," as he desper- 
 ately declared: "I will not send 
 Thee away, except Thou bless me." 
 As was shown in the article enti- 
 tled "Contrasted Covenants," pub- 
 lished in the number of Watchword 
 and Truth" for Sept., 1904, the 
 verb ShaLaCH, which our current 
 versions here render "Let me go," 
 expresses the thought of sending 
 one forth upon a special mission, 
 for the accomplishment of some 
 particular purpose. Its Greek 
 equivalent is apostello, from which 
 our word "apostle" is derived. The 
 angel did not ask merely that Ja- 
 cob should reluctantly permit him 
 to tear himself away ; but he wished 
 that the patriarch should heartily 
 concur in his evident desire to de- 
 
Jacob's Conversion 27 
 
 part; and thus should give up his 
 ,own will, and voluntarily submit to 
 that of his visitor. He asked to be 
 commissioned to go forth on Ja- 
 cob's behalf, desiring full confidence 
 that his way was best; and to this 
 Jacob consented, entreating only 
 for his blessing before he departed; 
 an entreaty that was graciously 
 complied with. Possibly the mis- 
 sion upon which he then went forth 
 was that of awakening in Esau's 
 mind thoughts of his boyhood days ; 
 thus preparing him to forget the 
 wrongs he had suffered, and to 
 greet .his brother with his early af- 
 fection. 
 
 Before the angel's departure, 
 however, he called Jacob's atten- 
 tion to the meaning of his name, 
 "Supplanter;" a name which Esau 
 had bitterly declared to be right- 
 ly bestowed; for, said he, "He 
 has supplanted me these two times ; 
 he took away my birthright; and, 
 behold, he has now taken away my 
 
28 Jacob's New Name 
 
 blessing." An appropriate name 
 had it been for the former man; 
 but it was not truly applicable to 
 the new man, for whom old things 
 had passed away, and all things had 
 become new. It had been his char- 
 acter to manage things for himself; 
 but it had now become his desire 
 to submit to the direction of his 
 God and trust to Him for all that 
 he needed. "Thou hast command- 
 ed with God and with men," said 
 the angel; that was the old man; 
 as for the new man, "Not Jacob 
 ('Supplanter') shall thy name be 
 called hereafter, but Israel ('God 
 commands'). As did his descend- 
 ant in later days, the patriarch now 
 realized, and could say with a 
 grateful heart : "Jehovah reigns ; 
 Jet the earth rejoice." "Jehovah 
 reigns; let the peoples tremble." 
 
 Like others who have yielded 
 themselves to God, Jacob went 
 forth a changed man; not a per- 
 fect man by any means; for the 
 
Jacob's Conversion 29 
 
 old nature still struggled with the 
 new one; but, nevertheless, a man 
 whose sincere desire it had become 
 to obey the commands of God, and 
 to rely confidently upon Him. 
 
 It is especially to be deplored 
 that the passage with which we 
 have been dealing has been so bad- 
 ly mangled in our current transla- 
 tions. Our accepted version reads: 
 "Thy name shall be called no more 
 Jacob, but Israel (That is, A prince 
 of God) : for as a prince hast thou 
 power with God and with men 
 and hast prevailed." This is the 
 only place in our English Bibles in 
 which the phrase, "Power with Gotd" 
 occurs ; and to this source must 
 therefore be attributed much of the 
 prevalent thought in regard to the 
 "power" of prayer; yet the truth 
 is, that in this passage of Scripture, 
 as our Heavenly Father gave it to 
 mankind, there is no mention either 
 of a "prince," or of "power," or of 
 "prevailing;" and Jacob's blessing 
 
3O Jacob's New Name 
 
 was obtained, not by his struggle, 
 but by his surrender.. 
 
 The revisers improved the trans- 
 lation materially, and yet left it 
 very faulty; their rendering of the 
 above passage is: "Thy name shall 
 be called no more Jacob, but Isra- 
 el (That is, He who striveth with 
 God or God striveth) ; for thou hast 
 striven with God and with men, 
 and hast prevailed." The introduc- 
 tion of the word "power" into the 
 earlier version is accounted for by 
 a note, saying: "The Septuagint 
 and Vulgate have; thou hast had 
 power with God, and thou shalt 
 prevail against men." This is rath- 
 er a free translation, however, for 
 the true reading of the Septuagint 
 is, "Having been strong with God, 
 also with men shalt thou be able," 
 while the Vulgate, introducing the 
 word "prevail," reads, "If thou hast 
 been strong against God, how much 
 more shalt thou prevail against 
 men!" 
 
Jacob's Conversion 31 
 
 That the real meaning of the 
 name Israel is "God commands" 
 will be fully shown in the follow- 
 ing chapter, which will also call 
 attention to some of the surprising 
 and most important results which 
 follow upon a recognition of its 
 true force. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Title Sar 
 
 When the crippled Jacob had 
 surrendered to the visitor against 
 whose superior strength he long 
 had vainly struggled, the angel 
 said unto him, What is thy name? 
 and he said, Jacob (the supplanter). 
 
 "And he said, not JACOB shall 
 thy name be called hereafter, but 
 I-SRA-EL: for thou hast SAR-red 
 with God and with men, and hast 
 been able." 
 
 The appellation then given to this 
 ancestor of the Hebrew nation term- 
 inates in EL, one of the names of 
 God. The I with which it begins is 
 a sign that the following verb has 
 
The Title Sar 33 
 
 a masculine subject in the third per- 
 son, and that it is in the tense com- 
 monly (but erroneously) called "fu- 
 ture." The truth is that verbs of 
 this kind may refer to time either 
 past, present or future ; but that the 
 action is thought of, not as having 
 come to an end, but as going on or 
 continuing. Our present tense fre- 
 quently expresses the same thought. 
 The remaining letters SRA are 
 closely connected with the verb 
 transliterated SAR, whose radical 
 meaning is "to arrange," "to set in 
 order," or "to order." This is most 
 clearly evidenced in the noun 
 SORAH, meaning "an arrange- 
 ment," or "an orderly disposition " 
 
 As the corresponding Arabic 
 word SARUH is applied to a row of 
 stones, our translators jumped to 
 the conclusion that the Hebrew 
 equivalent must mean "a row," and 
 therefore translated it accordingly 
 (or rather, by the words "in rows") 
 in Isaiah xxviii, 25, which is the 
 
34 Jacob's New Name 
 
 only Biblical passage in which the 
 term occurs. 
 
 "Doth he not cast abroad the 
 fitches, and scatter the cummin, 
 and put in the wheat in rows and 
 the barley in its appointed place and 
 the spelt in the border thereof?" 
 
 An examination of the Scriptural 
 references to the sowing of wheat 
 will show, that it was the custom to 
 sow this grain broadcast; and there 
 is no reason to think that the He- 
 brews then used anything like a 
 drill, to plant their wheat in rows. 
 On referring to the ancient versions, 
 we will find, that the Septuagint 
 translators did not render the word 
 SORAH at all ; apparently because 
 they were not sure as to its mean- 
 ing. Jerome, however, who had the 
 assistance of a number of Jewish 
 Rabbis, correctly represented it in 
 the Vulgate by the words "per or- 
 dinem." 
 
 It is clear that what the prophet 
 meant was, not that the wheat was 
 sown "in rows/' but that it was 
 
The Title Sar 35 
 
 sown in the proper place or time; 
 or in due order. The Jewish 
 farms were of small size, and the 
 farming much resembled our gar- 
 dening. The farmer prepared sec- 
 tions of his ground for fitches and 
 cummin; he had an appointed place 
 for barley, and spelt was sown along 
 the borders. . But in addition to 
 these arrangements he also devoted 
 a large section to wheat ; and here it 
 was that the wheat was sown "in 
 order, or in due time." 
 
 From the root meaning "to ar- 
 range," "to set in order," the He- 
 brew language, in its earliest his- 
 torical stage, had formed the noun 
 SAR, meaning "He who arranges," 
 or "He w'ho sets in order." This 
 was applied, specifically, to a man 
 who had charge of a number of his 
 fellow-men, who were set in order, 
 arranged, or detailed for their sever- 
 al duties, by him ; he was their "ar- 
 ranger," "or orderer," and was also 
 their leader or chief. 
 
 In English the noun "6fder," has 
 
36 Jacob's New Name 
 
 as its fundamental thought, that of 
 a proper arrangement of a number 
 of units, so that each is duly dis- 
 posed in relation to all the others; 
 yet by a natural growth the term 
 has also come to be applied to a 
 command by means of which due 
 order upon the part of a nuypjber of 
 subordinates is secured. The He- 
 brew term had nearly the same de- 
 velopment; as the "arranger," or 
 "orderer," performed his work by 
 giving "orders" or commands to the 
 men under his charge, he soon came 
 to be looked upon rather as the 
 "Commander," than as the "Ar- 
 ranger." 
 
 In Genesis and the first chapter of 
 Exodus, the title SAR was applied 
 as follows : 
 
 First: To the officers of Phar- 
 aoh's court, who had charge of his 
 affairs. Gen. xii, 15: "The 
 SARS of Pharaoh saw her [Sarah], 
 and praised her to Pharaoh." 
 
 Second: To Potiphar, "captain" 
 of Pharaoh's bodyguard. 
 
The Title Sar 37 
 
 Third: To Phicol, "captain" of 
 Abimelech's little band of armed 
 men. 
 
 Fourth: To the "chief" of Phar- 
 aoh's butlers, and the "chief" of his 
 bakers. 
 
 FiftrK To the "keeper" of the 
 prison in which Joseph was con- 
 fined. 
 
 Sixth : To the overseers or "task- 
 masters" in charge of the Hebrews, 
 when they were reduced to slavery. 
 The word was employed with this 
 meaning by the Hebrew who smote 
 his brother, and who, when reproved 
 by Moses, answered: "Who made 
 thee an overseer and a judge over 
 us?" 
 
 Seventh : To the herdsmen whom 
 Pharaoh requested Joseph to ap- 
 point as "rulers" over the king's 
 cattle. See Gen. xlviii, 6. 
 
 This completes the use of the 
 term in the Biblical history of events 
 prior to the exodus from Egypt. It 
 will readily be seen that it was then 
 applicable to any officer however 
 
38 Jacob's New Name 
 
 low his rank might be whom a 
 higher authority entrusted with the 
 management of any part of his 
 affairs, or placed in charge of a band 
 of men, whether soldiers, labourers 
 or slaves, or even assigned to the 
 care of a herd of cattle. 
 
 As a word of this kind is needed 
 in every language, and the English 
 formerly had none, the common peo- 
 ple have borrowed from the Dutch 
 the term "boss," which would be a 
 very satisfactory equivalent if it 
 were not "low." The word "Com- 
 mander" implies greater dignity 
 than was necessarily involved in the 
 office described by the Hebrew title, 
 in its earlier use; but as time went 
 on this title gradually cast off its 
 applicability to men having but 
 petty authority, and finally became 
 a term indicative of high position. 
 Considering its wide range of mean - 
 ing, "Commander" is perhaps the 
 best equivalent that the English 
 language possesses, which has a 
 
The Title Sar 39 
 
 verb of similar meaning derived 
 from the same root. 
 
 After the noun SaR had come into 
 common use, the verb derived from 
 the same root naturally came to 
 mean, "to act as a SaR; to give or- 
 ders ; to command." Yet this is not 
 very different from its original 
 meaning, "to arrange; to set in or- 
 der; to order." The verb had evi- 
 dently obtained this degree of de- 
 velopment when it was used in Gen- 
 esis xxxii, 28 : 
 
 "Thou hast commanded (SAR- 
 red) with God and with men; and 
 hast been able." 
 
 That had been Jacob's prevailing 
 characteristic. He had always de- 
 sired to arrange for himself all 
 affairs with which he had had con- 
 nection. He assumed the position 
 of leader or commander, and tried 
 to dictate, not only to his fellow- 
 men, but even to God Himself. It 
 should be noticed that it was not 
 said: "Thou hast commanded God 
 and men"; but, "Thou hast com- 
 
40 Jacob's New Name 
 
 manded with God and with men"; 
 that is to say, he had given com- 
 mands; and, regardless of the fact 
 that they were futile, he had as- 
 sumed an authority that he did not 
 possess. The new name was in- 
 tended as a constant reminder of his 
 true position; as a constant appeal 
 to his new nature. He was not 
 commander; "God commands." 
 
 And yet, there is almost a tone of 
 admiration in the last words. "And 
 thou hast been able;" for Jacob had 
 indeed shown great human ability; 
 he had been shrewd in planning and 
 keen in bargaining, and his angelic 
 visitor was able to praise him to that 
 extent; but Jacob had now learned 
 that the time comes when human 
 ability fails, and is taught to realize 
 that "There is a Divinity that shapes 
 our ends; rough-hew them how we 
 will." Over all our planning and 
 struggling, "God commands." 
 
 It may be noticed that the revisers, 
 giving to the verb the erroneous 
 meaning "to strive," say that the 
 
The Title Sar 41 
 
 name means, "He who striveth 
 with God," or "God striveth." Al- 
 though it has already been clearly 
 shown that the true meaning of the 
 verb is "to command," and not "to 
 strive," the question still remains 
 May not the meaning of "Israel" 
 be "He who commands God," rather 
 than "God commands," or, "He 
 whom God commands"? 
 
 The answer is: "First: The first- 
 mentioned of these possible mean- 
 ings would be untrue : Jacob did 
 not command God : he attempted it ; 
 but failed, and surrendered. 
 
 Second : The Hebrew construc- 
 tion almost always places the verb 
 first, immediately followed by its 
 subject. There are some forty He- 
 brew names beginning with a verb 
 in the so-called future tense, and 
 terminating either in EL (God) or 
 in JAH, IAH, or YAH, meaning Je- 
 hovah. In all but two of these there 
 is no question that God or Jehovah 
 is represented as performing the ac- 
 tion expressed by the verb. The two 
 
42 Jacob's New Name 
 
 exceptional cases; Jahaleel, said to 
 mean "He praises God," and Jahleel 
 defined "He waits for God," may 
 rather mean "God praises (him)," 
 and "God waits for (him)." That 
 God sustains some special and pe- 
 culiar relation to the action is in- 
 dicated by shortening the vowel be- 
 fore the terminal component. This 
 shortening sometimes occurs for 
 other reasons, when the termination 
 is not in the accusative case; but it 
 certainly would not fail to occur if 
 God were represented as the object 
 of the action. "He commands God" 
 would therefore be written "Isreel," 
 rather than "Israel." It therefore 
 seems clear that the verb means 
 "God commands," or in its specific 
 application to the man Jacob, "He 
 whom God commands." 
 
 Having thus learned the meaning 
 of the title SaR in its earlier use, it 
 may be interesting, and will cer- 
 tainly be helpful, to examine its 
 later history. 
 
 When Moses appointed "able 
 
The Title Sar 43 
 
 men out of all Israel, and made 
 them heads over the people, rulers 
 of thousands, rulers of hundreds, 
 rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens," 
 who judged the people, these 
 "rulers" were entitled SaRs. When 
 Balak sent ambassadors to Balaam, 
 these also were described by the 
 same term. In the Book of Joshua 
 this is said to be the title claimed 
 by the "captain" of the host of the 
 Lord, before whom the leader of 
 the Israelites loosed his shoe from 
 off his foot. In Judges we find the 
 term applied to Zebul the "ruler" 
 of the city of Shechem. In times 
 still later David was a SaR, in 
 Saul's army ; and this title was given 
 to Abner, Amasa, Joab and Naa- 
 man. In First and Second Kings 
 we read of the SaRs of the chariots, 
 and of the SaRs of Jezreel, even 
 the elders. 
 
 Coming down to the days of the 
 prophets, we find that Isaiah in his 
 earlier writings (chapter iii., verse 
 3) mentioned "the SaR of fifty," thus 
 
44 Jacob's New Name 
 
 showing that Moses' system of gov- 
 ernment had remained in force, in 
 this respect at least, as late as the 
 reign of Jotham. Jeremiah, in sev- 
 eral passages, referred to the SaRs 
 of the Assyrian army, apparently 
 meaning their generals. With these 
 exceptions, none of the prophets 
 used the term in any other meaning 
 than that of the noblemen of the 
 king's court, employed as his higher 
 officers, and having charge of some 
 department of his affairs. 
 
 Hosea mentioned the title eight 
 times, and prophesied that the chil- 
 dren of Israel should abide many 
 days without a king and without a 
 SaR. In accordance with this 
 prophecy, none of the prophets who 
 wrote after the return from the 
 Babylonian captivity made any ref- 
 erence to a SaR. Zephaniah (i, 8), 
 distinguished between the SaR and 
 the King's children. The word also 
 occurs in the writings of Amos and 
 Micah. 
 
 In Ezra and Nehemiah this title 
 
The Title Sar 45 
 
 is given to the people's rulers, to the 
 "chiefs" of the priests, and to the 
 officers in charge of the various dis- 
 tricts, or \vards, into which Jerusa- 
 lem was divided; also to the "gov- 
 ernor" of the castle, and to the 
 "captains" of the Assyrian army. 
 In First and Second Chronicles the 
 term is used in accordance with its 
 meaning during the times de- 
 scribed. 
 
 In Daniel and Esther the term is 
 uniformly translated "prince," the 
 former referring to "the prince of 
 the eunuchs," "the prince of the 
 host," "the prince of princes," and 
 "Michael, the great prince." 
 
 It has now been shown that the 
 title SaR had a gradual growth and 
 development of meaning. 
 
 First : Prior to the days of Moses 
 it was employed in a sense closely 
 akin to that of its root, and meant 
 "the arranger," "the orderer," or 
 "the commander"; so that it was 
 applicable to men as low in rank 
 as the keeper of a prison, the chief 
 
46 Jacob's New Name 
 
 of a number of servants, the over- 
 seer of a gang of slaves, or the 
 herdsman of a drove of cattle. 
 
 Second : After this title was given 
 to the "able men" whom Moses 
 made "heads over the people," it 
 soon ceased to be applicable to a 
 mere foreman, and was given only 
 to officers of high rank, such as am- 
 bassadors, mayors and generals. 
 
 Third : After the establishment 
 of the monarchy, the title was ap- 
 plied to the noblemen about the 
 king's court, who executed his 
 commands; finally being reserved 
 almost exclusively for these noble- 
 men; for the officers of equal rank 
 who commanded the king's army, 
 and for the "chief priests" who had 
 a rank somewhat similar in the 
 temple service. 
 
 Very important consequences 
 which follow a recognition of these 
 facts will be considered hereafter. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Mythical Theory 
 
 and 
 The Meaning of the Name 
 
 The skeptical critics of the last 
 score or two of years have fancied, 
 that proof of their theory of the 
 late date of the Scriptural writings 
 is found in the alleged discovery, 
 that the histories of the times of 
 Samuel, Saul, David and Solomon, 
 do not go back and repeat the 
 events of the lives of Abraham, 
 Isaac and Jacob. 
 
 No man of sound and reasonable 
 mind would expect such meaning- 
 less repetition ; and it would in fact 
 be surprising, if more than an occa- 
 sional allusion to the early patri- 
 archs were to be found in the later 
 writings. Such allusions in fact oc- 
 
48 Jacob's New Name 
 
 cur, and it therefore becomes neces- 
 sary for the critics to account for 
 them. This they attempt to do, 
 either by making a general claim 
 that in such cases the names are em- 
 ployed in an ethnic sense, and re- 
 late to the Jewish people as a na- 
 tion, without any reference to actual 
 personalities, or else by falling back 
 upon the favorite assertion, that any 
 and all statements conflicting with 
 a pre-conceived theory are inter- 
 polations, "distinctly traceable to re- 
 daction." 
 
 Thus Solomon, in his repeated ap- 
 peals to the "God of Israel" in his 
 prayer at the dedication of the tem- 
 ple, meant the God of the Israelites ; 
 or perhaps it was the "Redactor"* 
 who meant this, when, in much later 
 times he composed the prayer and 
 attributed it to Solomon : and yet 
 
 * The reader will please observe that it 
 is an evidence of great scholarship to em- 
 ploy this word "Redactor," with or without 
 its French twist into "Redacteur," in this 
 careless manner; rather than to use its 
 English equivalent "Editor." 
 
The Mythical Theory 49 
 
 this can hardly be the case, for in 
 the "Redactor's" times it was the 
 fashion to use the word "Israel" as 
 the fancied appellation of a mythi- 
 cal ancestor. So we become in- 
 volved in a general muddle ; and 
 nothing is really clear, except that 
 the Bible must not be believed; for 
 all the stock of faith that a man can 
 well possess is urgently needed for 
 the acceptance of the critics' incon- 
 sistent theories. 
 
 Elijah upon Mount Carmel prayed 
 to the God of Abraham, of Isaac and 
 of Israel, that He would let it be 
 known that He was God in Israel. 
 So says the Bible ; but, according to 
 the critics, that is merely the state- 
 ment of some later writer, who re- 
 corded various "legends," or fairy- 
 tales, prevalent among the people. 
 To be sure, there is a remote possi- 
 bility, that some mysterious, but 
 real, personality, lurked behind the 
 names of Elijah and Elisha. If so, 
 it is only necessary to assign him to 
 times at least as late as those of the 
 
50 Jacob's New Name 
 
 "unknown writer" of the Jehovistic 
 document afterward embodied in the 
 Pentateuch. In fact, it is one of the 
 "fascinating conjectures" of the 
 critics, that he "may" have been 
 identical with that personality. In 
 their eyes anything "may" have been 
 true, and hence probably was true, 
 and therefore should be unhesitat- 
 ingly accepted as true, except that 
 men of God spake as they were 
 moved by the Holy Spirit their 
 prophecy not coming by the will of 
 man. 
 
 It is the skeptical theory that the 
 Jehovistic and Elohistic documents 
 were written before the days of the 
 earliest prophets. Hejnce, if this 
 theory were true, they must have 
 been as well known to those ser- 
 vants of the Lord, as they would 
 have been if our Saviour's statement 
 were accepted, that Moses wrote of 
 Him. It is, therefore, somewhat 
 difficult to see how the fact, that 
 several of the prophets do not men- 
 tion the patriarchs at all, has any 
 
The Mythical Theory 51 
 
 bearing upon the question in regard 
 to the truth of the Pentateuch, other 
 than to prove, beyond all contro- 
 versy, that a prophet who was fa- 
 miliar with their history might write 
 without referring to them. 
 
 Such folly is hardly credible, yet 
 it is upon the flimsy foundation 
 above described, that the critics have 
 based their "irresistible conclusion," 
 that nothing- was known, in the land 
 of Israel, of the patriarchs, or of the 
 stories in which their names figure, 
 until after the period which is now 
 selected by "learned" men as that 
 of the production of these "imagina- 
 tive tales"- - that is to say, some 
 time during or after , the reign of 
 Jeroboam. Then it was, according 
 to these great "scholars," that the 
 ethnic myths, known as the "Stories 
 of the Patriarchs" first appeared. 
 
 Some there are, indeed, who have 
 weakly permitted themselves to 
 fancy, that these tales may have 
 been based upon traditions coming- 
 down from a distant past, and pre- 
 
52 Jacob's New Name 
 
 served by oral transmission from 
 generation to generation; so that 
 the Jewish people may really have 
 had ancestors named Abraham, 
 Isaac and Jacob. It is now, how- 
 ever, the general "consensus of 
 opinion" among these ''learned" 
 critics, that the use of personal 
 names to designate tribes or bands, 
 and the putting of tribal history into 
 the form of personal story, were so 
 common everywhere in primitive 
 times, especially among Oriental 
 peoples, as to make it quite impos- 
 sible that any true history of an 
 early ancestor could have been pre- 
 served, either orally or by means of 
 written documents. 
 
 To this unanswerable assertion, 
 we are called upon to add the some- 
 what remarkable circumstance that, 
 after using the short and easy pro- 
 cesses hereinbefore described, for 
 removing from the historical books 
 all references to the patriarchs, no 
 further references to them are found 
 to remain therein. 
 
The Mythical Theory 53 
 
 "O wonderful, wonderful, and 
 most wonderful wonderful ! and yet 
 again wonderful ! and after that, out 
 of all whooping!" Is it possible that 
 mortal man, within the little space 
 of his short life, can become so 
 learned! Well may these "higher" 
 critics mount the house-tops, and 
 like a swarm of predatory cicadas, 
 raise a never-ending strident chorus 
 of self-laudation ! 
 
 Our Saviour endorsed the history 
 of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and 
 said that they were still living unto 
 God. With a love of truth so great, 
 that they are willing shyly to admit 
 that they, and they alone, are 
 "learned" no others ,need apply 
 our "scholars" of to-day deny that 
 those patriarchs ever existed. So 
 the issue is joined. 
 
 It is the purpose of the present 
 little book to show, that it was 
 God's good pleasure to "make foolish 
 the wisdom of the world," by em- 
 bodying in the new name which He 
 bestowed upon the repentant Jacob 
 
54 Jacob's New N>me 
 
 fivefold proof of the truth of His 
 Word. 
 
 We will first consider the proof 
 contained in the meaning of the 
 name; for this is of such a nature 
 that it must first have been the 
 name of an individual, and could 
 never have become the appellation 
 of a nation, otherwise than by de- 
 rivation from an early ancestor. 
 
 Mr. Amos Kidder Fiske, in his 
 book entitled "The Myths of Israel," 
 thus describes the views of the 
 "higher critics." 
 
 "The general name for the He- 
 brew tribes in their union had been 
 Israel from time immemorial. Many 
 writers assume* that it antedated 
 the Egyptian bondage. According 
 to the generally-acceptedf etymol- 
 ogy it meant 'warrior of God.' 
 
 * Good for Mr. Fiske! They do indeed 
 "assume" the foundation of nearly every- 
 thing they say. 
 
 f Here we have our old acquaintance, 
 the "consensus of opinion." 
 
The Meaning of the Name 55 
 
 "The Hebrews were not essen- 
 tially a warlike people, and they 
 could hardly have given themselves 
 that title in the Nomadic days. It 
 more probably sprang out of the one 
 era in their history, when they were 
 nerved to desperate battle for the 
 possession of a country which they 
 claimed by inheritance and divine 
 promise, and when their deity be- 
 came a 'God of battles.' It is more 
 likely that Israel was adopted as a 
 general title by a people engaged in 
 a war of conquest, than by one 
 roaming about with flocks and 
 herds, or dwelling in servitude in a 
 foreign land." 
 
 Let us first inquire how it became 
 the "generally-accepted" opinion 
 that "Israel" means "Warrior of 
 God." Turning to the Hebrew dic- 
 tionary of Gesenius, written in the 
 early part of the last century, long 
 before philology had become an 
 exact science, we find that he defines 
 this appellation, "Warrior of God; 
 
56 Jacob's New Name 
 
 from SaRaH." He states that the 
 verb SaRaH means : 
 
 "i. To set in a row, to arrange 
 in order. 
 
 "2. To be a leader, prince or 
 chief. 
 
 "3. To contend, to strive; cog- 
 nate with the Arabic ShaRY." The 
 noun SaR he defines, "A perfect, 
 leader, master, chief; especially of 
 military chiefs and leaders, a com- 
 mander or captain." 
 
 It is not necessary to trace back 
 to earlier days this crude conjecture 
 in regard to the meaning of the 
 name Israel; nor is it any dispar- 
 agement of his work to call atten- 
 tion to the fact that since his times 
 philology has become a science. It 
 is certainly not too much to expect, 
 however, that the men who exult so 
 greatly in their ''higher" scholarship 
 and who boast so strenuously of the 
 "modern thought" of our wonderful 
 twentieth century, should be able to 
 give us something better, upon an 
 important philological question, than 
 
The Meaning of the Name 57 
 
 a rough guess, hoary with the de- 
 crepitude of old age. 
 
 The following are facts which 
 settle the true meaning of the word 
 in question : 
 
 First. It has already been men- 
 tioned, that the first element in the 
 compound-word "Israel" is a verb, 
 and not a noun ; and that the second 
 element is the word "God," which 
 furnishes the subject of which the 
 verb is the predicate. The com- 
 pound, therefore, can not possibly 
 mean "Warrior of God," but, if the 
 verb expressed the thought of con- 
 flict, would mean "God wars." Our 
 revisers saw that this could not pos- 
 sibly be the meaning; .they, there- 
 fore softened the expression, and de- 
 fined it "God striveth ;" thus coming 
 nearer to the truth in form, although 
 remaining as far as ever from it in 
 substance. 
 
 Second : As was fully shown in 
 regard thereto in the last chapter, 
 the title SaR is not "especially" 
 applicable to military chiefs and cap- 
 
 j 
 
58 Jacob's New Name 
 
 tains. On the contrary, of the four 
 hundred instances, more or less, in 
 which the term occurs in the Old 
 Testament, fully three hundred re- 
 late to the commanders of depart- 
 ments of civil life. 
 
 Third : In the cases, compara- 
 tively few in number, in which the 
 title is applied to a soldier, it never 
 refers to any other than the com- 
 manding officer of a body of troops 
 their captain or general. 
 
 Nearly half a century ago, Arte- 
 mus Ward, the American humorist, 
 proposed to recruit a military force, 
 to put an end to the civil war. This 
 is the substance of his statement : 
 
 "Having noticed a general desire 
 on the part of young men to wear 
 epaulets, I determined to have my 
 company composed exclusively of 
 officers; everybody to rank as Brig- 
 adier-General; thus preventing any 
 jealousy. The idea of a company 
 composed exclusively of Command- 
 er-in-chiefs, originated, I suppose I 
 scarcely need say, in this brain. 
 
The Meaning of the Name 59 
 
 Considered as an idea, I flatter my- 
 self that it is pretty hefty." 
 
 It has remained for those most 
 potent, grave and reverend seign- 
 iors, our "higher critics," to appro- 
 priate his idea, and attempt to im- 
 prove upon it, by giving to a whole 
 nation men, women and children 
 alike the title of "Commander-in- 
 chief of God/' 
 
 Fourth: The Hebrews were so 
 far from being a body of military 
 generals, or even from calling them- 
 selves a nation of soldiers of any 
 kind, that they never coined a- word 
 meaning "warrior." Their nearest 
 approximation to this term was to 
 speak of "a man of war," or "a 
 maker of war" ; while the word ren- 
 dered "war" really means "an eat- 
 ing-up; a devouring; a devastation." 
 Almost alone among the nations of 
 the earth, they found no glory in 
 slaughter and destruction, and when 
 they were compelled to speak of war 
 they used a term that described its 
 horrors. War they must, in many 
 
6o Jacob's New Name 
 
 cases ; but it was always a repulsive 
 necessity. They would never have 
 thought of claiming for themselves 
 the distinctive title of Warriors ; and 
 their whole nature would have risen 
 in protest against the application of 
 such a name to them by the outside 
 world. Their delight was, and still 
 is, in the arts of peace. 
 
 Fifth: The title we have been 
 considering has a feminine form, our 
 Common name "Sarah." This does 
 not mean a female warrior or Ama- 
 zon, as it should if the masculine 
 form meant Warrior; but is the title 
 of a "Commandress," a term which 
 in its later usage was especially ap- 
 plicable to the wife or daughter of 
 a SaR. 
 
 Judges v, 28-29. In the song of 
 Deborah : 
 
 "Through the window she looked 
 forth, and cried 
 
 The mother of Sisera through the 
 lattice : 
 
 Why is his chariot so long in com- 
 ing? 
 
The Meaning of the Name 61 
 
 Why do the movements of his 
 
 chariots delay? 
 
 Her wise commandresses answered 
 her." 
 
 Here the Vulgate has: 
 
 "One wiser than his other wives 
 responded to her mother-in-law with 
 these words." 
 
 I Kings xi. 3: "And he [Solo- 
 mon] had seven hundred wives, 
 commandresses"; that is to say, 
 women of noble birth ; even, in some 
 cases, the daughters of kings. 
 
 Isaiah xlix, 23 : "And kings shall 
 be thy nourishers, and their com- 
 mandresses (i. e., their wives of 
 noble birth) thy nurses. 
 
 Lamentations i, 18: "She that 
 was great among the nations 
 
 commandress among the pro- 
 vinces 
 
 She has become tributary." 
 
 Esther i, 18: "This day the 
 commandresses of Persia and Media 
 who have hearkened to the utter- 
 ances of the queen (in her refusal to 
 obey the king) will say (the like) 
 
62 Jacob's New Name 
 
 unto all the king's commanders; so 
 will there be sufficient contempt 
 and wrath." 
 
 The narrative goes on to state 
 that the king thereupon sent letters 
 into all his provinces, "that every 
 man should SAR in his own house." 
 Possibly, even some of our "higher 
 critics" may be able to see that it 
 was the intention of the king that 
 every man should command not 
 that he should carry on war in his 
 own house. 
 
 Sixth : As is indicated by the last 
 example, the cognate verb (appear- 
 ing in three different forms, as 
 SaRaH, SWuR and SaRaR) always 
 means "to command" ; never ''to 
 make war." 
 
 Numbers xvi, 13: Dathan and 
 Abiram complained to Moses that 
 he had brought the Israelites up out 
 of a land flowing with milk and 
 honey, to kill them in the wilder- 
 ness, and added: "SaR-ring over 
 us, thou wilt SaR," rendered in the 
 revised version: "Thou must needs 
 
The Meaning of the Name 63 
 
 make thyself also a prince over us." 
 There is certainly no thought that 
 Moses made himself a warrior over 
 the people. 
 
 Judges ix, 22: "And Abimelech 
 SWuRred over Israel three years," 
 that is to say, he commanded them, 
 or ruled over them ; he did not make 
 war upon them. 
 
 Proverbs viii, 15-16: "By Me 
 [Wisdom] kings reign, 
 
 And princes decree justice. 
 
 By Me SARS SAR, 
 
 And nobles all the judges of 
 
 the earth. 
 
 The statement is that command- 
 ers command, or rulers rule; not 
 that warriors make war.- 
 
 Hosea viii, 4: "They have made 
 themselves kings, 
 
 But not by Me. 
 They have made SARS; 
 And I knew (them) not. 
 Isaiah xxxii, I : "Behold, a king 
 shall reign in righteousness, 
 
 And SARS shall SAR in judg- 
 ment." 
 
64 Jacob's New Name 
 
 With the exception of the use of 
 this verb in regard to Jacob, we 
 have here quoted all the passages in 
 the Bible in which it has been rec- 
 ognized as occurring; although 
 there are two others, to which it is 
 not now necessary further to refer, 
 in which it is really to be found. 
 
 Nothing can be plainer than that 
 the thought is that of ruling or 
 commanding, and that there is in it 
 no more thought of war or strife 
 than there is of baking bread or 
 herding cattle. 
 
 The use of words derived from 
 the root SAR, in other Semitic lan- 
 guages, as well as by the neighbor- 
 ing Persians, will be considered in 
 the following chapter. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Title in Other Tongues 
 
 Our examination of the Old Tes- 
 tament passages in, which the He- 
 brew text employs words derived 
 from the root SaR, that occurs 
 in the name "Israel," having indi- 
 cated that this appellation means 
 "God commands," and does not 
 mean "Warrior of God," we will 
 now put this conclusion to the test 
 of an examination of the meaning 
 of the words used in the transla- 
 tions of the Bible into other Sem- 
 itic languages, as equivalents of 
 the Hebrew terms that we have 
 been considering; this will be es- 
 pecially helpful in cases in which 
 words derived from the same root 
 
66 Jacob's New Name 
 
 are employed. Singularly enough, 
 the title SaR has become so 
 thoroughly naturalized in the In- 
 do-European Persian language, 
 and some of its connections, that 
 it will be necessary to examine its 
 force in these tongues also. 
 
 For SaR the Samaritan version 
 uniformly uses RaB, "great one," a 
 word which is common to nearly 
 all Semitic languages, and which, 
 with the suffixed pronoun mean- 
 ing "my," has passed from the 
 Aramaic through the Greek, in- 
 to our English New Testaments, 
 as "Rabbi." The Syriac also em- 
 ploys the same term, with RaYSh, 
 "head" (the Hebrew RoESh), as 
 a variant: a third term used as an 
 equivalent is ShaLITA, which, un- 
 der the form "Sultan," has come to 
 us from the Arabic through the 
 Turkish. In the Syriac version of 
 Genesis xlvii. 6, MORA, "Lord," 
 is found, a word which appears as 
 the initial component of the Aram- 
 aic "maran-atha," in I Cor. xvi, 22. 
 
The Title in Other Tongues 67 
 
 The Assyrian language has no title 
 derived from the root SaR, for 
 although a king is entitled SaRRu, 
 and in the construct state this takes 
 the form SaR, it is, nevertheless, 
 derived from the root SaRaR, which 
 appears in the verb SaRaRu, "to 
 shine ; to be bright, glorious or re- 
 splendent," and has no connection 
 with the Assyrian verb SaRu, 
 which like the corresponding Arabic 
 word has the meaning "to wander 
 or roam about." In accordance 
 with its derivation, SaRRu denotes 
 the supreme authority; while the 
 Hebrew word for King, MeLeK. 
 appears in Assyrian as MaLKu, 
 with the meaning of an officer of 
 lower rank, a prince or viceroy. 
 The Commander-in-chief of the 
 Assyrian army was entitled the 
 TuRTaNnu, or TaRTaN, as the 
 word appears in II. Kings, xviii, 17: 
 and the officers of lower rank were 
 given the title SaKNu, cognate 
 with the Hebrew SeGaN and the 
 Chaldaic SiGeN. which words may 
 
68 Jacob's New Name 
 
 in fact have been borrowed from 
 the Assyrian language. Although 
 the Arabic language still contains 
 the term SaR (now almost obsolete, 
 and very rarely used otherwise than 
 in compound nouns) and also pos- 
 sesses the word RaBB, which cor- 
 responds to the term generally used 
 as its equivalent in Chaldaic, Sa- 
 maritan and Syriac, the Arabian 
 translators of the Bible preferred to 
 use either RaYS, "head," (plural 
 RuWaSsa), or WALY, "governor." 
 The Chaldaic targums of Onkelos 
 and Jonathan generally render SaR 
 by RaB, but sometimes employ 
 ShuLTON. 
 
 What is probably the only case 
 in which the word SaR is found in 
 a translation into any of these 
 Semitic languages, is in the rendi- 
 tion of Isaiah iii, 3, in the Chaldaic 
 text of Arius Montanus. Here, 
 where Isaiah referred to "the SaR 
 (captain) of fifty," we find "the 
 SaR (or RaB) of fifty." It is evi- 
 dent that the translator considered 
 
The Title in Other Tongues 69 
 
 the Chaldaic term RaB not to be en- 
 tirely satisfactory as a rendition of 
 the Hebrew title; and he therefore 
 transliterated the original word; 
 yet, knowing that his readers prob- 
 ably would not understand it, he 
 added a Chaldaic explanation, em- 
 ploying RaB as the best equivalent 
 that the language possessed. 
 
 The Hebrew feminine title 
 SaRaH is also without an equiva- 
 lent from the same root in the Sem- 
 itic languages. So, too, the verb 
 which appears in our Hebrew Bi- 
 bles under the forms SaRaH, 
 SWuR, and SaRaR, is found in 
 none of the Semitic Bible transla- 
 tions, with the single exception of 
 'the Samaritan, in which it has the 
 form ShRiR. Here it is interest- 
 ing to observe that, in the transla- 
 tion of Genesis, the form SaRaH, 
 which was there used in the He- 
 brew text, was not followed; but 
 the much later SaRaR served as 
 the model. It is also noticeable 
 that these dwellers in Mount Eph- 
 
7o Jacob's New Name 
 
 raim confused the two sibilants Sh 
 and S ; much as their Ephraimite 
 ancestors did in earlier days, when 
 they "could not frame to pro- 
 nounce" the Hebrew Word "Shib- 
 boleth" correctly; but saij "Sibbo- 
 leth" instead. 
 
 MiSRaH, meaning "commander- 
 ship," occurs only in the Hebrew 
 text of Isaiah ix, 6. Here the Sy- 
 riac has "sultanship" and the Arab- 
 ic "headship," while Jonathan in 
 his Chaldaic targum paraphrases, 
 and gives us no real equivalent. 
 There is one more Hebrew noun 
 derived from the ..root SaR 
 MeSuRaH meaning "that which 
 is used for arranging or putting 
 in order," the term being ap- 
 plied to a measure, in which fruits 
 or other articles offered for sale 
 were neatly arranged. In its form 
 this word is curiously like its Eng- 
 lish equivalent; but the resem- 
 blance is merely accidental. The 
 Chaldaic, Syriac and Arabic lan- 
 guages all employ in its place a 
 
The Title in Other Tongues 71 
 
 word formed from the root KIL, 
 and the Samaritan is again the only 
 Semitic language which uses the 
 Hebrew root SaR. 
 
 In Isaiah x, 15, the word 
 MaSsOR, meaning "a saw," and ap- 
 parently derived from SaR is 
 found ; but the corresponding words 
 in Chaldaic, Syraic, Ethiopic and 
 Arabic all indicate that the Jewish 
 Rabbis mispointed the Hebrew 
 term, and that it should read 
 MaShOR, as a derivative from an 
 entirely different root, with which 
 the words that we have been con- 
 sidering have no relationship. 
 
 It has already been stated that 
 Gesenius claims as his authority for 
 the assertion that the Hebrew verb 
 SaRaH may be employed with the 
 meaning "to contend, to strive," 
 that it is cognate with the Arab- 
 ic ShaRY, having this sense. As 
 a sufficient proof of his error, it 
 should be noticed, that he correctly 
 connects the Hebrew noun SORAH 
 with the Arabic SARUH, the sim- 
 
72 Jacob's New Name 
 
 pie sibilant S being used in both 
 languages. Semitic tongues keep 
 their various silibants quite dis- 
 tinct, and very rarely confuse 
 them. It would be within the 
 bounds of reasonable probability 
 that a Hebrew word with an ini- 
 tial S might have an Arabic equiv- 
 alent beginning with Sh; but if this 
 were the case it would be only as an 
 example of the application of a reg- 
 ular rule, under which a Hebrew 
 S would be represented by an 
 Arabic Sh in almost every in- 
 stance, with scarcely an exception. 
 If the Hebrew SaRaH were 
 cognate with the Arabic ShaRY, 
 then the Arabic equivalent 
 of SORAH should begin with 
 Sh instead of S. The conclu- 
 sion that the two words have no 
 connection with each other is con- 
 firmed and placed beyond all con- 
 troversy by the fact that the Arab- 
 ic root ShaR usually expresses the 
 thought either of trading or else of 
 
The Title in Other Tongues 73 
 
 wickedness or depravity. The 
 verb ShaRY means : 
 
 ist : To buy or sell. 
 
 2d : To bargain quarrelsomely 
 and with disputation. 
 
 3d: Hence, to act badly toward 
 another with whom one is ar- 
 guing, to call bad names, to 
 scoff at, or to accuse of malice. 
 
 Anyone who has seen two Moors 
 engage in the mosc angry conten- 
 tion, with the most threatening 
 gestures, over a matter of no im- 
 portance whatever - - apparently 
 about to tear each other limb from 
 limb will be sure to understand 
 the meaning of this verb, and the 
 necessity for its 'existence in the 
 Arabic language; while its inappli- 
 cability to the circumstances at- 
 tending Jacob's struggle against his 
 angelic visitor is self-evident. It 
 expresses the thought of strife or 
 contention only so far as this is 
 manifested in angry words; in tor- 
 rents of Billingsgate. Our verb "to 
 wrangle" gives some approximation 
 
74 Jacob's New Name 
 
 to the thought, but lacks the in- 
 tense excitement and bitterness of 
 the Arabic term, of which the fun- 
 damental conception is very differ- 
 ent from that of the Hebrew 
 SaRaH, "to place in order, or to 
 order." 
 
 Before concluding our examina- 
 tion of the Arabic, it seems desir- 
 able to call attention to the use of 
 the root SaR by the Persians, and, 
 as a prelude thereto, to turn to the 
 Sanskrit, to show that it is not an 
 Indo-European root, and therefore 
 could not have entered into the lan- 
 guage of the Persians otherwise 
 than as a term borrowed from their 
 Semitic neighbors. 
 
 The Sanskrit has a noun SURa, 
 meaning "a hero,"which might pos- 
 sibly be thought to be derived from 
 a root SaR, if it were not for the 
 fact, that the form given above 
 seems to be a mere misspelling of 
 the word of much more common oc- 
 currence, spelled either CURa or 
 CuRa, meaning "a hero, warrior 
 
The Title in Other Tongues 75 
 
 or champion; a lion; a boar." This, 
 in turn, is derived from the root 
 CRI, which conveys the thought 
 of hurting, wounding or killing. A 
 warrior, a lion, and a boar, are all 
 wounders and killers ; and this is 
 therefore the thought expressed in 
 the name which they possess in 
 common. Hence it is clearly evi- 
 dent that the Sanskrit SURa, "a he- 
 ro" that is to say, a killer and 
 the Hebrew SaR, "a commander," 
 that is to say, an orderer are not 
 of common origin. 
 
 In the Persian language SaR 
 means "head or chief." By prefix- 
 ing this word to hang (an army), 
 ghaskar (another term for an 
 army) or fanj (troops) we obtain 
 the title of the commander or gen- 
 eral of a body of soldiers. 
 So the appellation of the commander 
 of a body of cavalry (called 
 khail) is sar-khail. So far the ti- 
 tle is of a military nature, and 
 might possibly be thought to mean 
 "Warrior;" but ghaugha being a 
 
76 Jacob's New Name 
 
 mob, sar-ghaugha is the leader of 
 the mob, and a caravan, called 
 qafila, is led by an officer called the 
 sar-qafila. Pas and nauba both 
 mean "a watchman," and a head- 
 watchman is called either sar-pas 
 or sar-nauba. Khwan is a table or 
 desk, and daftar is a book. A sar- 
 khwan is a reader, lecturer or sing- 
 er, and a sar-daftar is a book-keep- 
 er, clerk or accountant, while a sar- 
 kar is a superintendent or overseer 
 of work (kar). If further evidence 
 is needed that the term SaR has in 
 it no thought of war, it may be 
 found in the fact that it is some- 
 times applied even to animals. 
 Thus qala is a flock or herd, of 
 which the sar-qala is the leading 
 animal; while sar-qitar is the appel- 
 lation given to the first camel of a 
 long string of camels following one 
 another, known as a qitar, each 
 camel, except the sar-qitar having 
 its halter made fast to the saddle 
 or harness of the animal before it. 
 That the Semitic title SaR was 
 
The Title in Other Tongues 77 
 
 adopted and naturalized by the 
 people of Persia long before the 
 days of their conquest by the Mo- 
 hammedan Arabs, is evidenced by 
 the fact that, under the form 
 gara, it is found in the ancient 
 Zend, together with a number of 
 other words derived from the same 
 root. 
 
 In Arabic SaR, and in Turkish 
 SeR, are used in precisely the same 
 way as in the Persian language; so 
 that sar-ghaskar is equally intelli- 
 ble to Arabs, Turks and Persians, 
 as meaning "the general of the 
 army." In the Arabic dialect 
 spoken in Egypt, the word is giv- 
 en its Turkish pronunciation sir; 
 a chief aide-de-camp' being called 
 sir-jawiran; a grand master of cer- 
 emonies, sir-tashryfaty, and the 
 chief of the corporation of mer- 
 chants, sir-tugar. 
 
 Lest it might be thought that 
 the English word "Sir," of precise- 
 ly the same form and some ap- 
 proximation in meaning, is of sim- 
 
78 Jacob's New Name 
 
 ilar origin, it may be well to call 
 attention to the fact that this is 
 merely a modification of "Sire," 
 coming to us from the Latin senior 
 (elder) through the Old French 
 senre. So, too, it may be said that 
 SaR has no connection with the 
 Slavonic "Czar," the Latin "Cae- 
 sar," or the German "Kaiser;" for, 
 if such a connection existed, the 
 Hebrew word should begin with a 
 guttural, or at least with the sibi- 
 lant Samekh instead of Sin. 
 
 In Arabic, from the word DAR, 
 meaning "a mansion," applied spe- 
 cifically to the ruler's palace, we 
 find the title sar-dar given to an of- 
 ficer of high rank, the king's lieu- 
 tenant, or the chief of a depart- 
 ment of the government. This 
 word also occurs with the same 
 meaning in Turkish and Persian, 
 and even in the Pushtoo language 
 of Afghan, which seems to have 
 borrowed it from the Persian, to- 
 gether with a number of other sim- 
 ilar compounds in which a prefixed 
 
The Title in Other Tongues 79 
 
 Sar has the meaning of command- 
 er or chief. The Armenian lan- 
 guage has also borrowed a number 
 of similar terms. 
 
 While we have by no means ex- 
 hausted the list of compounds of 
 this nature contained in the Arab- 
 ic vocabulary, it is none the less 
 true that this title is not used as 
 freely in that language, to which it 
 is native, as it is in the Persian, in 
 which its exotic nature is evidenced 
 by the fact that it is employed only 
 as a title, and has no verb or other 
 part of speech connected with it. 
 Although the root has disappeared 
 from some of the languages of the 
 Semitic family, its employment in 
 the composition of a number of dif- 
 ferent verbs and nouns in Hebrew, 
 Samaritan and Arabic, is sufficient 
 proof of its true Semitic origin. 
 
 So free is the Arabic verb 
 SaRaH from the thought of war- 
 ring or striving, that its principal 
 use is connected with the duty of a 
 SaR, or herder, of cattle. From 
 
8o Jacob's New Name 
 
 its fundamental meaning of setting 
 in order, or assigning each member 
 of a band to his proper place, or 
 duty, it has come to be applied 
 mainly to setting cattle free in the 
 morning, so that they may go to 
 pasture ; from this it has come to be 
 figuratively applied to a man going 
 to his work; and, beyond this, to 
 roaming about. Its original force 
 still appears quite clearly, however, 
 in its causative form, meaning, "to 
 comb the hair, or let it flow down 
 the back." 
 
 It has now been fully shown that 
 the Semitic root SaR means "to ar- 
 range, to set in order," and hence 
 "to order or command;" that it is 
 used far more frequently in regard 
 to the affairs of civil life than to 
 those of warfare, and that it nev- 
 er refers to any other warrior than 
 the officer in charge of a body of 
 troops. 
 
 Hence the name "Israel" could 
 never have been applied in the first 
 instance to an entire nation, with 
 
The Title in Other Tongues 81 
 
 the thought of characterizing them 
 as a body of warriors. It must 
 originally have been the designa- 
 tion of some particular man; and it 
 could come to be the name of a na- 
 tion only through their descent 
 from him. 
 
 It has therefore been fully dem- 
 onstrated, as our first point, that 
 it pleased our Heavenly Father to 
 embody in the meaning of the 
 name "Israel" conclusive proof of 
 the falsity of the skeptical theories 
 of modern "higher" criticism. 
 
 It will hereinafter be shown that 
 the same word "Israel" contains 
 within itself three additional proofs 
 of the truth of God's Word; while 
 still another evidence of the falsity 
 of modern critical theories is fur- 
 nished by the fact, that one of the 
 forms of the verb derived from the 
 root SaR had become obsolete, and 
 was misunderstood, at the time of 
 the return from Babylon. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 The Date of Genesis 
 
 It is not a pleasant task to step 
 aside from the firm footing of 
 the King's highway, in which the 
 wayfaring men, though fools, can- 
 not err; and attempt to pick one's 
 way over the quaking quagmires 
 of infidelity's bottomless absurdi- 
 ties, through an atmosphere reek- 
 ing with miasmatic effluvia; yet 
 this course is sometimes necessary 
 for the rescue of perishing brethren, 
 who have heedlessly followed blind 
 guides into the bog. 
 
 Although we are warned of the 
 danger that answering a fool ac- 
 cording to his folly may cause us 
 to became like him, we are never- 
 
The Date of Genesis 83 
 
 theless instructed to answer a fool 
 according to his folly, lest he be 
 wise in his own conceit; and surely 
 there was never a time when infi- 
 delity swaggered about with a 
 greater inflation of self-conceit than 
 at present. 
 
 Let us, therefore, examine that 
 fundamental assumption of the 
 modern "higher" criticism which re- 
 lates to the date of the Hexateuch. 
 Here follows an authoritative state- 
 ment of the critics' theory upon the 
 subject: 
 
 "The first six books of the Old 
 Testament were put into their pres- 
 ent form after the return from the 
 exile in Babylon. The priestly code 
 was then formulated, and woven 
 somewhat crudely into the pre- 
 existing material. In addition to 
 the Book of Deuteronomy, contain- 
 ing the law put in force in the time 
 of Josiah's reforms, this consisted 
 chiefly of the old primitive or 'sa- 
 cred' history of the people, which 
 was used as the framework of the 
 
84 Jacob's New Name 
 
 whole. This had been compiled in 
 the time of Hezekiah, mainly from 
 two older versions, one of which 
 had been produced in the Land of 
 Judah from half a century to a cen- 
 tury before his days, and the other 
 in the Northern Kingdom in times 
 somewhat earlier; but certainly 
 later than the division of Solomon's 
 Kingdom. This material consti- 
 tutes the bulk of the Book of Gene- 
 sis and the first part of Exodus, and 
 is traceable in fragments through 
 the other books." 
 
 In other words, it is the critics' 
 theory that no book of the Bible 
 antedates the days of Solomon or 
 his father David. 
 
 As the critics did not live in the 
 reign of Hezekiah or Josiah, it does 
 not seem unreasonable to ask how 
 they came to know so much about 
 the events of those times. What 
 source of information do they pos- 
 sess that is not open to us all? 
 What evidence do they present that 
 their picturesque description of the 
 
The Date of Genesis 85 
 
 affairs of those early days is some- 
 thing more than the dream of a 
 vivid imagination ? 
 
 In all their writings not one iota 
 of proof is given. We have their 
 statement: let that be sufficient. 
 They are kind enough to< favor us 
 with their conclusions, and these we 
 are called upon thankfully to ac- 
 cept, without question. No be- 
 liever in Jesus Christ is expected to 
 be rash enough to 'ask for the data 
 upon which such conclusions are 
 based; for the subject is too ab- 
 struse and complicated to be within 
 the comprehension of the common 
 mind. Failure to accept their evan- 
 escent whimsies : each as it is pre- 
 sented is a manifestation either of 
 gross ignorance or of sordid hypoc- 
 risy, and is moreover "intolerance 
 toward a scholarship which merely 
 insists upon telling the truth"; 
 while he who opens his mouth and 
 shuts his eyes, unhesitatingly swal- 
 lowing everything that he is told to 
 
86 Jacob's New Name 
 
 gulp down, is immediately enrolled 
 as a gentleman and a scholar. 
 
 The critics' theory, that the his- 
 tory of Jacob is merely a myth, has 
 been disproved in the preceding ar- 
 ticles of this series, by showing the 
 true meaning of the name "Israel" 
 to be such that it must first have 
 been the appellation of a man, and 
 that it could never have become the 
 name of a nation, otherwise than by 
 their descent from him. It now re- 
 mains to present the three additional 
 proofs of the truth of God's Word 
 that are embodied in this same 
 name. 
 
 In the second chapter of this little 
 book attention was called to 
 the fact that the title SaR, the root 
 of which enters into the name "Is- 
 rael," had a gradual development 
 of meaning, commencing in the days 
 prior to the exodus with its applica- 
 tion to any "boss" or foreman, how- 
 ever petty his authority might be, 
 and ending finally in its exclusive 
 reservation for noblemen of the 
 
The Date of Genesis 87 
 
 highest rank, attached to the royal 
 court. Hosea, who wrote in the 
 Northern Kingdom, but little, if any, 
 later than the date assigned by the 
 critics to the first draft of the 
 earliest portion of the Book of Gene- 
 sis, used this title eight times, but 
 never with any other than the last- 
 mentioned meaning. In fact, after 
 the entry of Joshua into the land of 
 Canaan, this appellation was never 
 given to any other than an officer 
 of high rank. 
 
 Now will the critics kindly ex- 
 plain how it happened, that the 
 "unknown writer" to whom they 
 attribute^ the "first draft" of the 
 most marvelous literary production 
 that the world has ever known, 
 who, as they allege, produced his 
 work in the same little kingdom as 
 that inhabited by Hosea, and at a 
 time but little, if any, earlier than 
 the days of that prophet, used the 
 word SaR in the Book of Genesis 
 with a meaning differing widely 
 from that which it possessed for 
 
88 Jacob's New Name 
 
 the people among whom they say 
 that he wrote? 
 
 For those who will not accept as 
 conclusive our Saviour's statement 
 that Moses wrote of Him, what 
 stronger proof of the early date of 
 Genesis could be " given, than the 
 fact that a word is used therein 
 with a meaning which it never had 
 in the speech of the people after the 
 exodus, and yet with a sense iden- 
 tical with that of its root, and un- 
 questionably the sense from which 
 the later meaning was derived? 
 
 Again, we find that this title SaR 
 has a feminine form SaRatl, used 
 by Deborah in her well-known 
 "Song," assigned, even by the 
 critics themselves, to a very early 
 date. Yet in the Book of Genesis, 
 and in that book alone, there is 
 found a much earlier form SaRal, 
 so archaic that the best Hebrew 
 scholars are unable to explain it, or 
 define its exact meaning with any 
 degree of certainty. 
 
 Maimonides, in his "Guide for the 
 
Thv Date of Genesis 89 
 
 Perplexed" (part I, chapter Ixviii), 
 admits that the Rabbis are to some 
 extent "ignorant of the sacred lan- 
 guage" ; and he can find no better 
 explanation of the name SaRal.than 
 that which is obtained by compar- 
 ing it with ADoNal, "Lord," which 
 differs from ADONI, "My Lord," 
 in much the same way that SaRal 
 differs from SaRI, "My Command- 
 er." The form with a vowel "a" 
 before the terminal "I" denotes, he 
 says (part I, chapter Ixi), "majesty 
 and distinction." Gesenius states 
 that grammarians differ as to the 
 force of the ending of ADoNal. 
 "Many regard it as a plural form 
 put for the singular, as spoken of 
 the Divine Majesty. Others con- 
 sider it the same as the regular 
 plural having the suffixed pronoun 
 'My,' so that it properly means 'My 
 lords' ; then as a plural of excel- 
 lence, 'My Lord,' and at last, the 
 force of the suffix being neglected, 
 'Lord,' 'the Lord.' This latter view 
 seems preferable." 
 
QO Jacob's New Name 
 
 Accepting the conclusion that 
 SaRal is a "plural of excellence." 
 used at an early time when the title 
 SaR was regarded as being of either 
 the masculine or the feminine gen- 
 der, and that, as Maimonides says, 
 the termination denotes "majesty 
 and distinction," the appellation 
 might be defined-, "My great Com- 
 mander." Bearing in mind the fact 
 that the name ABRaM means 
 "Father of Exaltation," which in 
 the Hebrew idiom is practically 
 equivalent to "Exalted Father," it 
 is at once apparent that both of 
 these names are unsuitable for sin- 
 ful mortals; for God alone can 
 properly be entitled the "Exalted 
 Father," and He alone can rightly 
 be addressed as "My great Com- 
 mander." Both names were there- 
 fore changed by God; his, to 
 ABRaHaM, "Father of a Great 
 Multitude," and hers, to SaRaH, 
 "Commandress." 
 
 Now, will the critics, who hold 
 that Genesis was written after the 
 
The Date of Genesis 91 
 
 days of Solomon, kindly explain 
 how it happened that the writer 
 used the archaic form SaRal, which 
 does not appear elsewhere, while 
 Deborah in the days of the Judges, 
 employed the later form SaRaH? 
 Could stronger proof be given of 
 the early composition of the Pen- 
 tateuch, than is furnished by the 
 existence of this archaic word there- 
 in? 
 
 Still another evidence oi the 
 early date of Genesis is found in 
 the fact, already mentioned, that 
 the verb meaning "to set in order," 
 or "to command," derived from the 
 root SaR, appears in the Hebrew 
 text of the Old Testament in three 
 different forms. In the account of 
 Jacob's struggle with his heavenly 
 visitor, and there alone, it has the 
 form SaRaH. In a section of the 
 Book of Judges relating to the his- 
 tory of the northern portion of the 
 Land of Israel, and in the Prophecy 
 of Hosea, who wrote in the North 
 Kingdom and for its people, this 
 
92 Jacob's New Name 
 
 verb has the form SWtiR, while in 
 Numbers, Proverbs, Isaiah and 
 Esther it is spelled SaRaR. 
 
 These facts indicate that SaRaH 
 was the earlier form, which in the 
 days of Moses was already becom- 
 ing obsolete, SWuR taking its place 
 in the dialect of the northern tribes, 
 while their southern kinsmen 
 adopted the form SaRaR. After the 
 people of the northern kingdom 
 had been carried away to Assyria ; 
 when their country had been re- 
 populated with Babylonians and 
 others ; these newcomers seem either 
 to have brought with them, or 
 else to have adopted, a form similar 
 to that in use in the Land of Judah ; 
 for, as has already been stated, the 
 Samaritan verb meaning "to com- 
 mand" has the form ShRIR. 
 
 A curious proof of the extent to 
 which SaRaH bad become unintel- 
 ligible to many of the people in 
 the days of Ho'sea, may be found 
 in the fact, that when (in chapter 
 xii, verse 5) he referred to Jacob's 
 
The Date of Genesis 93 
 
 struggle with the angel, he quoted 
 the exact word employed in the 
 Book of Genesis, and wrote: "He 
 SaRaH-ed God:" then, fearing this 
 might not be understood by the 
 people whom he addressed, he re- 
 peated the statement in their own 
 dialect, "Yes, he SWuR-red with 
 an angel." Further proof of the 
 prevalence of this last-mentioned 
 form at this time and place, is con- 
 tained in the fact, that it was the 
 form used by him in chapter viii, 
 verse 4; the only other occasion on 
 which it has been recognized that 
 he employed this verb. 
 
 Yet the critics, deaf to this dif- 
 ference of dialect,, and blind to 
 every ray of true historical light, 
 hold that the first draft of the Book 
 of Genesis was written by some un- 
 known writer, who lived but little 
 if any earlier than the days of Ho- 
 sea ! Could any theory be more ab- 
 surd? Could even atheistic folly 
 find a deeper depth in which to wal- 
 low? 
 
94 Jacob's New Name 
 
 This investigation of the facts 
 connected with the Hebrew words 
 derived from the root SaR, which 
 appears in the name "Israel," has 
 taken so much time and space, that 
 it may be well to close with a re- 
 capitulation of the fourfold proof 
 embodied therein of the truth of 
 God's Word. 
 
 First: The meaning of the name 
 "Israel" is such that it must first 
 have been bestowed upon some one 
 man, and no race of people could 
 ever have borne it, otherwise than 
 because of their descent from him. 
 The critics' theory, that no man 
 named "Israel" ever existed, is 
 thereby effectually disproved. 
 
 Second: The title SaR -was em- 
 ployed in the Book of Genesis and 
 the first chapters of Exodus in a 
 sense which it never had after the 
 days of Moses. The inference is 
 therefore clear and positive that 
 this portion of the Word of God 
 was written before the children of 
 Israel entered the land of Canaan. 
 
The Date of Genesis 95 
 
 Third: The feminine title SaRaH 
 was in use at least as early as the 
 days of Deborah; yet Genesis con- 
 tains a form SaRal, which is very 
 much earlier ; a form so: archaic that 
 its true meaning has been forgotten. 
 The inference follows that Genesis 
 was written long before the times 
 of the Judges. 
 
 Fourth: In the Book of Genesis 
 the verb derived from the root 
 SaR has the form SaRaH; which 
 never appears in any later book, ex- 
 cept in the single instance in which 
 Hosea quotes it from Genesis, and 
 then explains it by the form preva- 
 lent in the dialect of his own days. 
 As the forms SaRaR and SWuR 
 are used in Numbers and Judges, 
 the earlier date of the account in 
 Genesis is thereby conclusively 
 proven. 
 
 Now it is hardly credible that, 
 among all the boastful "scholars" 
 who have vociferously chanted the 
 praises of infidelity, there has not 
 been one with sufficient scholarship 
 
96 Jacob's New Name 
 
 to see these facts for himself. Of 
 the mob of hangers-on, who attempt 
 to show their wisdom by shouting 
 "Amen" in response to every ut- 
 terance of their German masters, 
 no real acquaintance with modern 
 philology could be expected; but 
 it would seem that, among the lead- 
 ers of "modern thought," there must 
 be here and there a man with suffi- 
 cient scholarship to force these facts 
 upon his attention. 
 
 What then can be thought of the 
 indifference that has been mani- 
 fested in regard to them, and of 
 the concealment of these truths 
 from the "mixed multitude" of de- 
 luded followers? Is it not evident 
 that their boasted "love of truth" 
 is merely devotion to their own 
 fancies? Have they not shown 
 very clearly that they neither 
 have eyes to see nor ears to hear 
 neither hands to write nor tongues 
 to utter any truth that conflicts 
 with their own atheistical ideas? 
 
 Alas for those weak lovers of our 
 
The Date of Genesis 97 
 
 Lord Jesus Christ who have turned 
 their backs upon their Master and 
 followed these blind guides into the 
 morasses of infidelity! It is with 
 the hope that some of these may 
 be led to open their eyes and see 
 their true position ; and so may be 
 induced to return to the King's 
 highway of truth and holiness ; that 
 this study is published. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 A Change of Language 
 
 It has already been shown, that 
 in the name "Israel" and in the al- 
 lied words derived from its charac- 
 teristic root, there are contained 
 four plain proofs of the unsound- 
 ness of modern critical theories. 
 
 To these a fifth may be added, 
 consisting of the fact that at the 
 time of the Jews' return from their 
 Babylonian exile, the Hebrew lan- 
 guage, which they had formerly 
 spoken, had become so obsolete, 
 that the true meaning of its verb 
 SWuR had been entirely forgotten. 
 Their ancient language had be- 
 come so unintelligible to the great 
 mass of the people, that when "the 
 
A Change of Language 99 
 
 Law of God" was read aloud in 
 their hearing they could not under- 
 stand it, until it had been translated 
 for them into the Chaldean tongue, 
 which during their exile had be- 
 come their means of communica- 
 tion. At the time of their return, a 
 few old men were still living who 
 could remember the first temple, 
 and who, therefore, must have had 
 some recollection of the language 
 spoken during their boyish days; 
 but these soon died, and thereafter 
 the Hebrew was known only as a 
 literary language, acquired by 
 study, as Latin now is. 
 
 The synagogue translators were 
 forbidden to write out their inter- 
 pretations, and having but slight 
 opportunity for comparing their 
 work with that of others thus cor- 
 recting errors it would have been 
 surprising if they did not occasion- 
 ally misunderstand a word, and thus 
 give to it an incorrect rendering. 
 A man of influence who erred in 
 this way would mislead his hearers 
 
ioo Jacob's New Name 
 
 and his pupils, and, in later genera- 
 tions, his erroneous translation 
 might come to be universally ac- 
 cepted. 
 
 There is a general impression 
 that the Jewish people, or their 
 Rabbis, at least, thoroughly under- 
 stand the Hebrew language; but 
 this belief is without sufficient 
 foundation. They do not speak it; 
 they cannot write in it; and their 
 conception of much of its grammati- 
 cal structure, and of the meaning of 
 many of its words, is quite erron- 
 eous. It is to them a foreign lan- 
 guage; just as Latin is to the Rom- 
 ish priests. They know it only as 
 it has been taught to them by their 
 teachers and their books: and the 
 errors of the earlier Rabbis, having 
 been accepted as the truth by their 
 scholars, have been handed down 
 by one generation to another, until 
 they now come to us with the en- 
 dorsement of all the Hebrew schol- 
 ars of all the intermediate ages : yet 
 they are just as erroneous today as 
 
A Change of Language 101 
 
 when they were first brought into 
 being. 
 
 In the course of time, by the in- 
 corporation of many words from the 
 tongues of the various peoples with 
 whom they came in contact, and 
 by other natural causes, the Chal- 
 d"aic language developed into the 
 Aramaic, which was spoken in Pal- 
 estine, as the language of the fam- 
 ily, during our Saviour's visit to 
 earth; while Greek was the tongue 
 used in nearly all public affairs, and 
 was unquestionably the language 
 in which our Lord's discourses 
 were delivered. 
 
 The so-called "Hebrew," in 
 which the Rabbinical teachings 
 are preserved, and which is used 
 by the Rabbis of today, is merely 
 the ancient Chaldaic, modified to 
 some extent by the Aramaic, and 
 with an admixture of Greek and 
 Latin terms. It is no more Hebrew 
 than English is Anglo-Saxon. 
 There is a connection between the 
 earlier and the later language in 
 
IO2 Jacob's New Name 
 
 both cases; yet the mutual unintel- 
 ligibility of the two forms of speech 
 is as great in one family of lan- 
 guages as in the other. 
 
 The "Yiddish," in which news- 
 papers are printed for the Jews, has 
 very slight connection even with 
 the Rabbi's "Hebrew"; but is usu- 
 ally merely a corrupt German dia- 
 lect printed with Hebrew charac- 
 ters, and containing an occasional 
 Chaldaic or Aramaic word: a Sla- 
 vonic dialect is also sometimes 
 printed in the same way, and given 
 the same name. 
 
 This long explanation has been 
 necessary, to show the reason why 
 a man like Maimonides, con- 
 fessedly the greatest scholar that 
 the Jewish race has ever produced, 
 was obliged to admit that he and 
 his people were, to a certain extent, 
 "ignorant of the sacred language." 
 
 For the reason that the Jews used 
 
 one form . of speech before they 
 
 -vere expatriated, and another after 
 
 their return to Palestine, it would 
 
A Change of Language 103 
 
 have been absolutely impossible for 
 them, after the exile, to put the 
 Hebrew Scriptures into their pres- 
 ent shape; just as impossible as it 
 would have been for Shakespeare 
 to write in the language of Chaucer 
 and Gower, or even in that of Cax- 
 ton and Fabian; or as it would be 
 for our scholars of to-day to write 
 a long book in Anglo-Saxon, and 
 leave no trace of the fact that it 
 dated from a time after its language 
 had ceased to be spoken. Poor 
 Chatterton tried this with a few 
 poems, and miserably failed; and 
 no attempt of this kind has ever 
 been successful. 
 
 Even the later prophets, steeped 
 as they were in the earlier Hebrew 
 Scriptures; meditating upon them 
 day and night, and incorporating 
 them into their very beings ; could 
 not, and did not, write in pure He- 
 brew; but used so many Chalda- 
 isms that their language contains 
 within itself conclusive proof of the 
 date of their writings. 
 
iO4 Jacob's New Name 
 
 Of all human follies, begotten by 
 ignorant self-conceit, and brought 
 forth by blatant infidelity, none was 
 ever more absurd than the incon- 
 ceivable stupidity of attributing 
 the writing of the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures to a time when Hebrew had 
 become a dead language; just as if 
 the works of Cicero and Vergil 
 were to be attributed to the monks 
 of the middle ages. 
 
 Now, in God's Providence, it was 
 the fact, that when the Jews re- 
 turned to Palestine, two of the three 
 forms taken by the verb derived 
 from the root SaR had become ob- 
 solete; and they were therefore un- 
 intelligible, except as their meaning 
 could be conjectured from the con- 
 nection in which they occurred. 
 SaRaR was still remembered, and 
 was employed in the Book of Es- 
 ther; but the meaning of SaRaH 
 and SWuR could only be guessed 
 at; and the conjectures then made 
 happened to be erroneous. 
 
 When in Genesis xxxii, 28, they 
 
A Change of Language 105 
 
 read that Jacob had "SaRaH-ed 
 with God and with men," they 
 guessed that the verb meant "to 
 make oneself great" or "to be 
 strong," and translated it accord- 
 ingly, both in this passage and in 
 Hosea xii, 3-4 the only places in 
 which the word occurs. As the 
 form SWuR is employed in the last- 
 mentioned passage as synonymous 
 with it, it was here, and here only, 
 given the same meaning. This ren- 
 dering was adopted by the Septua- 
 gint translators, several centuries 
 before the Christian era; as well as 
 by the targumists, who in the early 
 years of our dispensation wrote out 
 in the Chaldaic language, and thus 
 preserved for us, the version which 
 had come down to them by oral 
 transmission from the times im- 
 mediately after the return from 
 Babylon. Still later, Jerome fol- 
 lowed it in his Latin version. This 
 rendering was therefore accepted 
 without question, until recent days, 
 when the new conjecture, that the 
 
 
io6 Jacob's New Name 
 
 word might mean "to strive," found 
 acceptance, and was followed by 
 the recent revisers. 
 
 In the remaining passages in 
 which SWuR occurs, the bewil- 
 dered translators wandered even 
 farther from the truth. The state- 
 ment in Judges ix, 22, that "Abime- 
 lech SWuR-red over Israel," could 
 hardly be misunderstood; and the 
 different versions therefore gener- 
 ally agree that he "reigned" over 
 Israel; except that the recent re- 
 visers tried the variation, "Abime- 
 lech was prince over Israel." Hosea 
 viii, 4, was almost equal!;/ free from 
 possibility of misunderstanding: 
 
 "They have made themselves 
 
 kings ; 
 But not by Me: 
 
 They have caused (men) to 
 
 SWuR; 
 And I knew (them) not." 
 
 Here the connection between 
 kings and their chief officers 
 known as SaRs, was so evident 
 that the conclusion could not be 
 
A Change of Language 107 
 
 avoided, that the verb must here 
 mean either "to act as a SaR," or 
 else "to appoint as a SaR." The 
 line was therefore always trans- 
 lated, "They have made princes," 
 until our revisers suggested in the 
 margin that it might mean, "They 
 have removed them;" a conjecture 
 which will be shown to be without 
 foundation. 
 
 Two additional passages contain- 
 ing this word Hosea ix, 12, and I. 
 Chronicles xx, 3 still remain for 
 consideration. In these the trans- 
 lators cut entirely loose from their 
 renditions hereinbefore cited, and in- 
 vented a theory that, in each case, 
 although the word was of precisely 
 the same form as that of the term 
 which we have been examining, it 
 was, nevertheless, an entirely dif- 
 ferent word, derived from another 
 root of wholly different meaning. 
 Moreover, these two new words 
 each occurring only once differed 
 as widely from each other, both in 
 derivation and force, as they did 
 
io8 Jacob's New Name 
 
 from the commoner word of the 
 
 same form. 
 
 In support of this theory, it was 
 explained that one of the two words 
 was merely a variant of another 
 term of somewhat similar form; 
 while some early grammarian ob- 
 ligingly invented a new root to ac- 
 count for the other. As this al- 
 leged "root" was not to be found in 
 the Scriptural Records, the explana- 
 tion was given that it was "obso- 
 lete" ; which was merely the "schol- 
 arly" way of admitting that it was 
 wholly imaginary. 
 
 Yet this theory, having once been 
 evolved and accepted, was found 
 so satisfactory as a support for 
 vicious renderings, that it has held 
 its place down to the present time; 
 and every Hebrew lexicon now fur- 
 nishes the "information" that the 
 Sacred Writings contain three dif- 
 ferent words, all having the form 
 SWuR, of which one is synony- 
 mous with SaRaR (which we have 
 shown to mean "to set in order" or 
 
A Change of Language 109 
 
 "to command"), while a second 
 (found only in I Chronicles xx, 3), 
 means "to saw," and the third (oc- 
 curring nowhere except in Hosea 
 ix, 12), is synonymous with an- 
 other verb, which may be written 
 CWuR, expressing the thought of 
 departing. 
 
 Here it is necessary to explain 
 that the Hebrew language, in com- 
 mon with most other Semitic forms 
 of speech, not only has written 
 characters to express the sounds of 
 several compound sibilants, in addi- 
 tion to S and Sh; but also has a 
 letter to indicate the sound of a 
 third simple sibilant, expressed 
 above by Q, which is a slight 
 whistle, made by forcing the 
 breath between the palate and the 
 top of the tongue, held loosely in a 
 position much like that necessary 
 for pronouncing R. Its sound dif- 
 fers from that of S almost as much 
 as does the sound of Sh, and there 
 is no difficulty in distinguishing 
 these three sibilants one from an- 
 
no Jacob's New Name 
 
 . other. With the exception of the 
 Samaritans, the Semites keep these 
 three letters quite distinct, and 
 rarely confound them. In fact, they 
 are no more likely to do so than we 
 are to neglect the difference be- 
 tween Sh and S, and say "shave" 
 for "save," or "shame" when we 
 mean "same." 
 
 Hosea used the verb CWuR four 
 times, and, in addition to its occur- 
 rence in the twelfth verse of his 
 ninth chapter, he employed the 
 word SWuR twice : in each case 
 the word that he selected was given 
 precisely its proper force, without 
 the slightest indication of confu- 
 sion between the two different 
 terms. The possibility that he 
 would fail to distinguish between 
 the two, when he employed SWuR 
 for the third time, is therefore ex- 
 tremely small. Moreover, Hosea 
 had occasion in the sixth verse of 
 his fifth chapter to speak of God's 
 withdrawing Himself from the 
 children of Israel; and here he used 
 
A Change of Language in 
 
 the verb ChaLaTz for that purpose. 
 Hence it is doubly improbable, if 
 he meant to express the same 
 thought in the twelfth verse of his 
 ninth chapter, that he would aban- 
 don the word used bef-.r\:, with the 
 intention of employing" (JWuR in 
 its place, and then carelessly write 
 SWuR instead. 
 
 License of the kind which would 
 lead to the translation of one of 
 these two words when the other is 
 written, would equally justify treat- 
 ing QaKaL, "to act foolishly," as 
 if it were synonymous with SaKaL, 
 "to act wisely," and would make 
 David's prayer, recorded in II Sam- 
 uel xxiv, TO. read : "I have sinned 
 greatly in that I have done; and 
 now, I beseech Thee, O Lord, take 
 away the iniquity of Thy servant: 
 for I have done very wisely," in- 
 stead of expressing the truth, that 
 he had acted very unwisely. 
 
 Hosea, after describing and la- 
 menting the wickedness of the chil- 
 dren of Israel,, announced the in- 
 
H2 Jacob's New Name 
 
 evitable consequences of their in- 
 iquitous course, and proclaimed the 
 Words of Jehovah: "Woe also to 
 them when I SWuR from them." 
 Now if the Jews, after their return 
 from Babylon, had known the true 
 meaning of SWuR, they would 
 have given us the correct rendering, 
 "Woe also to them when I take 
 command from them." 
 
 They had wholly forgotten the 
 term, however, and it was evident 
 that neither the force they had 
 given it in Hosea viii, 4, "to appoint 
 a SaR," nor that attributed to it in 
 Hosea xii, 4, "to be strong," could 
 express its meaning here. They re- 
 membered, however, that there was 
 another Hebrew word, GhWuR, 
 "to rise up," which differed from 
 SWuR in only its initial letter; 
 and, as they could do no better, 
 they evidently decided that this 
 verb ought to be substituted for the 
 one they did not understand. Their 
 Chaldaic rendering was modified, 
 however, by another principle they 
 
A Change of Language 113 
 
 had adopted, which was to soften 
 down all anthropomorphisms, by 
 which God is represented as seeing, 
 hearing, sitting, rising, or otherwise 
 performing a bodily action like a 
 human being; so they changed the 
 Scriptural statement to, "Woe also 
 to them when I raise up My She- 
 KiNaH from them," using the same 
 Chaldaic verb SeLaQ, "to come up, 
 to arise," which occurs in Ezra iv, 
 12, as also in Daniel ii, 29, and vii, 
 3, 8 and 20. Although this render- 
 ing was not reduced to writing un- 
 til after the beginning of the 
 Christian era, it probably came 
 down by oral transmission from 
 much earlier times. 
 
 When the Septuagint translators 
 performed their work, they found 
 the same difficulty in deciding what 
 SWuR meant; but they picked out 
 the Hebrew word ShAR, "flesh," 
 which, like the Chaldaic substitute, 
 differed from the original text in 
 only a single lejtter (besides the 
 pointing), as being the term for 
 
H4 Jacob's New Name 
 
 which the unintelligible SWuR had 
 probably been erroneously substi- 
 tuted, and so translated the pas- 
 sage, "Woe also unto them: My 
 flesh is out from them." Absurd as 
 is this collocation of words, Wal- 
 ton, in his Latin rendering of the 
 Arabic version, represents that it 
 was followed by the translators into 
 that language; but the truth is that 
 his Arabic text agrees with our 
 current English versions. 
 
 The Syriac translators did not 
 undertake to amend the Hebrew 
 text; but, guided by the context, 
 judged that SWuR must mean "to 
 take vengeance." Ignoring the 
 power of the preposition, they 
 therefore rendered the sentence: 
 "Woe to them; for I am about to 
 take vengeance from them." 
 
 Beginning with Jerome, a long 
 line of translators reasoned that 
 both the Chaldaic and the Greek 
 versions referred to what was prac- 
 tically a departure of Jehovah, and 
 that all difficulty would be removed 
 
A Change of Language 115 
 
 by the assumption (much more 
 plausible than either conjecture of 
 their predecessors), that SWuR 
 was here used as synonymous with 
 CWuR, "to depart." This assump- 
 tion was therefore made, and our 
 current versions read accordingly. 
 
 The correct translation, "Woe 
 also to them when I take command 
 from them," shows us that al- 
 though, as in the case of Jacob him- 
 self, his descendants had for a time 
 been permitted to go their own 
 way; yet nevertheless, for them as 
 for him, the hour was to come when 
 the Divine Being would visit them, 
 and give them to understand that 
 "God commands." 
 
 This was what was preached by 
 John the Baptist: "Repent ye: for 
 the sovereignty of heaven is at 
 hand." John the Apostle echoed the 
 thought of Hosea, when he wrote: 
 "Behold He cometh with clouds; 
 and every eye shall see Him, and 
 they also which pierced Him; and 
 all kindreds of the earth shall wail 
 
n6 Jacob's New Name 
 
 because of Him. Even so, Amen." 
 For a time our Heavenly Father, 
 not willing that any should perish, 
 but that all should come to repent- 
 ance, permits the nations to rage 
 and the peoples to imagine a vain 
 thing. Nevertheless, He has set 
 His King upon His sacred hill of 
 Zion, and in the fulness of time He 
 will take to Himself the sovereignty 
 that is rightfully His. 
 
 There is one more passage con- 
 taining the word SWuR still re- 
 maining for examination. This is 
 not only of great importance in it- 
 self; but it furnishes confirmatory 
 proof that, at or soon after the time 
 of the Jews' return from Babylon, 
 their most pious and scholarly men 
 did not fully understand the an- 
 cient Hebrew language; and there- 
 fore were quite incapable of putting 
 the Scriptures into their present 
 shape a fact which completely de- 
 molishes the fundamental theory of 
 the skeptical critics. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 David's Captives 
 
 Eminent among the heroes of 
 olden times looms up the form of 
 David, whose faith in God was 
 never shaken. 
 
 Through faith he fled away from 
 the edge of the sword, when he was 
 hunted as a partridge in the moun- 
 tains; through faith he was, from 
 weakness, made strong; so that he 
 subdued the kingdoms about him, 
 and came in touch with promised 
 blessings. Compelled to war, that 
 his nation might take the position 
 allotted to it by Jehovah, he never 
 battled otherwise than as the ser- 
 vant of the Lord: "It is God that 
 girdeth me with strength;" "He 
 
n8 Jacob's New Name 
 
 teacheth my hands to war;" "By 
 Thee do I rim through a troop ; and, 
 by my God do I leap over a wall." 
 
 Great as was his standing as a 
 warrior and king, his rank as a 
 poet of spiritual insight, inspired by 
 communion with his God, was even 
 greater; and, after the passage of 
 nearly three thousand years, his 
 Psalms are still enshrined in the 
 hearts of the people of the Lord, 
 as helpful beyond almost any other 
 portion of the Sacred Word; ex- 
 cepting only the utterances of our 
 Saviour Himself. 
 
 Yet, being but a child of Adam, 
 he was a partaker of human frailty. 
 Drawn away by his own lust, and 
 enticed, he committed one awful 
 crime, whose history coming down 
 through all the intervening ages has 
 given great occasion to the enemies 
 of the Lord to blaspheme, even to 
 this day. Repenting most sincerely, 
 he found the grace of our Lord suffi- 
 cient even for his cleansing; but, 
 nevertheless, sorrow and remorse 
 
David's Captives 1 19 
 
 never left him; and, when seventy 
 years old, he died of senile decrep- 
 itude, prematurely aged and broken 
 down. 
 
 After his death he had this testi- 
 mony borne to him : "My servant 
 David kept My commandments, 
 and followed Me with all his heart, 
 to do that only which was right in 
 My eyes." "David did that which 
 was right in the eyes of the Lord, 
 and turned not aside from anything 
 that He commanded him all the 
 days of his life, save only in the 
 matter of Uriah the Hittite." 
 
 Notwithstanding his ability as a 
 warrior, he was, nevertheless, a man 
 of exceptional tenderness of heart. 
 In his early manhood when Saul, 
 who had come out to seek his life, 
 was in his power, he refused to 
 stretch forth his hand against him; 
 and even when Saul, still pursuing 
 him, again lay helpless before him, 
 he for a second time declined to per- 
 mit any injury to be done him. In 
 later life when he had been ap- 
 
120 Jacob's New Name 
 
 pointed, as the minister of God, to 
 execute wrath upon him that did 
 evil, he, to some extent, bore the 
 sword in vain; for he refused to 
 punish those who had rebelled 
 against his government, and over- 
 looked the crime of Shimei, who 
 had cursed the Lord's anointed. 
 
 When Joab slew Abner David 
 said: "I am this day tender 
 [hearted]," and allowed him to go 
 unpunished. Even when, as fre- 
 quently follows in such cases, the 
 murderer again imbrued his hands 
 in human blood, David, weakened 
 perhaps by the remembrance of his 
 cwn guilt in which Joab had been 
 an accomplice still took no action 
 towards cleansing the land from 
 the defilement of innocent blood ; 
 but left the magistrate's duty to be 
 performed by his son. 
 
 This was the man of whom our 
 accepted version of the Bible gives 
 the following most horrible ac- 
 count : 
 
 II. Samuel xii, 29 and 31 : "And 
 
David's Captives 121 
 
 David gathered all the people to- 
 gether, and went to Kabbah, and 
 fought against it, and took it; ... 
 and he brought forth the people 
 that were therein, and put them 
 under saws, and under harrows of 
 iron, and under axes of iron, and 
 made them pass through the brick 
 kiln; and thus did he unto all the 
 cities of the children of Ammon." 
 
 I Chronicles xx, 3: "And he 
 [David] brought out the people 
 that were in it [Rabbah], and cut 
 them with saws, and with harrows 
 of iron, and with axes. Even so 
 dealt David with all the cities of 
 the children of Ammon." 
 
 The exact meaning; of the former 
 of these two passages may possibly 
 be questioned; but the second is 
 clear and unmistakable, and the 
 other can not properly be under- 
 stood otherwise than in accordance 
 with it. 
 
 The statement that David was 
 guilty of the awful savagery of us- 
 ing axes, saws and harrows to muti- 
 
122 Jacob's New Name 
 
 late and torture his helpless prison- 
 ers, and that he also burned them 
 in brickkilns, has given almost as 
 much "occasion to the enemies of 
 the Lord to blaspheme," as has his 
 crime "in the matter of Uriah the 
 Hittite" perhaps quite as much, or 
 even more. Infidels of all times 
 have pointed to this narrative, in 
 connection with the Biblical state- 
 ment, that David "turned not aside 
 from anything that God com- 
 manded him all the days of his life, 
 save only in the matter of Uriah 
 the Hittite," and have reasoned 
 therefrom that Jehovah, as revealed 
 in the Scriptures, delights in bar- 
 barity, and is therefore unworthy 
 of worship. In this manner a blun- 
 dering translation of His Word has 
 brought reproach upon His Name. 
 
 It should be remembered that 
 this was not a case like that of the 
 Palestinian tribes whom the Israel- 
 ites displaced ; tribes whose deprav- 
 ity was borne with century after 
 century, until their iniquity was 
 
David's Captives 123 
 
 "full;" tribes which were then 
 driven out little by little by a pest 
 of hornets, and the remnants of 
 which were given abundant oppor- 
 tunity to escape, if they would only 
 consent to do so, before the children 
 of Israel took complete possession 
 of the land a land which was 
 theirs, both by inheritance from 
 their ancestors, and as a direct gift 
 from God. 
 
 Nor was the case of the Am- 
 monites like that of the Amalekites, 
 who came forth from their own 
 country to wage an unprovoked 
 war upon the children of Israel, 
 merely because they were the peo- 
 ple of Jehovah; a nation which, 
 when defeated in open warfare, 
 dogged the footsteps of the Israel- 
 ites, and ''smote the hindmost" of 
 them, even "all that were feeble," 
 when they were "faint and weary" : 
 a nation whose implacable hostil- 
 ity, evidenced by the plottings 
 (which God foresaw) of Haman, 
 "the son of Hammedatha the Agag- 
 
124 Jacob's New Name 
 
 ite," would have entirely destroyed 
 the Hebrew race, if it had not been 
 for the direct interposition of the 
 Lord Himself. 
 
 As descendants of Lot, the Am- 
 monites were distantly connected 
 with the Jews, and Jehovah had 
 commanded His people neither to 
 distress nor meddle with them. Al- 
 though they had warred upon the 
 Israelites, it was only to meet de- 
 feat at the hands of Jephthah, and 
 again at those of Saul, and they had 
 been no more hostile than other 
 surrounding nations. Their king 
 Nahash had "shown kindness unto" 
 David in his time of need, and Sho- 
 bi his son was one of the three men 
 who freely supplied David and his 
 little army with provisions, when 
 they hastily fled to Mahanaim to 
 escape from Absalom, only a short 
 time before. After all this the 
 abuse of the Israelitish ambassa- 
 dors, by Hanan the succeeding king, 
 provoking as it was, could not jus- 
 tify the unique and incredible bar- 
 
David's Captives 125 
 
 barity which our English transla- 
 tors of the Bible ascribe to the Jew- 
 ish ruler. 
 
 The recent revisers made no im- 
 portant change in the text of either 
 II Samuel xii, 3i,,or I Chronicles 
 xx, 3, and did not even suggest a 
 modification of the last-mentioned 
 account. In the margin of the for- 
 mer of these two passages, how- 
 ever, they proposed the following as 
 a possible reading: 
 
 "He brought forth the people that 
 were therein, and put them to saws, 
 and to harrows of iron, and to axes 
 of iron, and [with a slight change 
 in the Hebrew text] made them 
 labour at the brick kiln [or brick 
 mould]." 
 
 It is evident, however, that this 
 can not express the true meaning, 
 if the translation of the correspond- 
 ing passage in Chronicles is to re- 
 main unchanged as they left it. 
 
 On examining the ancient Bibli- 
 cal translations we find that the 
 Chaldaic targum, the Greek Sep- 
 
126 Jacob's New Name 
 
 ttiagint and the Latin Vulgate all 
 give accounts agreeing with our 
 current English versions; in many 
 respects so minutely, that the ques- 
 tion at once suggests itself, whether 
 our rendering was not founded 
 rather upon these than upon the 
 original Hebrew text. 
 
 The Syriac and Arabic versions, 
 however, present a most remark- 
 able difference in their narrative of 
 the events following the capture of 
 Kabbah. The Syriac statement in 
 the Second Book of Samuel reads: 
 
 "And the people who were in it 
 he brought forth, and threw them 
 into fetters of iron, and chains of 
 iron, and made them pass through 
 a heifer." 
 
 The account in First Chronicles 
 is much fuller: 
 
 "And the people who were in it 
 he brought forth, and bound them 
 with chains and with fetters of iron, 
 and with bars and in prisons, and 
 thus he bound them all. And so he 
 did to all the sons of men who were 
 
David's Captives 127 
 
 found in the towns of the children 
 of Ammon, and he did not kill a 
 man of them; but he removed them, 
 and made them dwell in the towns 
 of the land of Israel." 
 
 With reference to the statement 
 that David made his prisoners "pass 
 through a heifer," it should be re- 
 membered that this was the cus- 
 tomary manner of entering into and 
 confirming a covenant. In the fif- 
 teenth chapter of Genesis we have a 
 full account of the way in which 
 "the Lord made a covenant with 
 Abram," by "passing" (in the ap- 
 pearance of "a smoking furnace and 
 a flaming torch"), "between the 
 pieces" of "an heifer" and other sac- 
 rificial victims, which Abram had 
 prepared in accordance with the 
 Divine command. In the thirty- 
 fourth chapter of Jeremiah we are 
 informed, that the violation of cove- 
 nant obligations by the Jewish peo- 
 ple caused Jehovah's severe denun- 
 ciation : 
 
 "I will give the men that have 
 
128 Jacob's New Name 
 
 transgressed My covenant, which 
 have not performed the words of 
 the covenant which they made be- 
 fore Me, when they cut the calf in 
 twain and passed between the parts 
 thereof; the princes of Judah and 
 the princes of Jerusalem; the eu- 
 nuchs, and the priests, and all the 
 people of the land, which passed be- 
 tween the parts of the calf; I will 
 even give them into the hand of 
 their enemies, and into the hand of 
 them that seek their life." 
 
 The Syriac statement therefore 
 presents no difficulties to one who 
 understands the above-mentioned 
 practice of confirming a covenant 
 by "passing through a heifer." It 
 happens, however, that the radical 
 letters of the Syriac term MaUSh- 
 oCHA, "a heifer" (a word which, 
 except for the fact that it is given a 
 feminine form, is a mere translitera- 
 tion of the Greek moschos, "a 
 call"), are precisely the same as 
 those of MaUShCHaA, "a measure." 
 It seems, also, that in the times 
 
David's Captives 129 
 
 comparatively recent when the 
 Syriac text was "pointed," the men 
 who did that work overlooked the 
 ancient method of making a cove- 
 nant. They therefore pointed the 
 word in question erroneously, and 
 made the text state that David 
 caused his prisoners to "pass 
 through a measure." In Walton's 
 Latin translation of the Syriac text 
 an effort was made to give sense to 
 this, by saying that David made 
 them pass through per mensura, or 
 "by measure." 
 
 Turning now to the Arabic ver- 
 sion we find the following account 
 in the Second Book of Samuel : 
 
 "He brought forth all the people 
 who were in it [Rabbah], and he 
 bound them with chains and with 
 girdles, and he made them pass be- 
 fore him to determine their fate." 
 The translator of this into Latin 
 for Walton's Polyglot evidently 
 failed to understand the latter part 
 of the sentence; for he made the 
 passage read : 
 
130 Jacob's New Name 
 
 "All the people who were in it he 
 brought forth, and he bound them 
 with chains and with ropes ; then 
 he made them pass before his face 
 in the shape of a certain measure." 
 This peculiar twist seems owing 
 partly to the error, already-men- 
 tioned, in the Syriac pointing; but 
 a factor of equal, or greater, impor- 
 tance may be found in the Septua- 
 gint rendering of one of the clauses 
 of the passage which we have been 
 considering. This reads : ''He led 
 them about through the plinthion." 
 Plinthion is a term applicable either 
 to the making of bricks, to a little 
 brick, to a brickyard or to a brick- 
 kiln; and in its feminine form it is 
 also a designation for a military 
 column, square or phalanx. It seems 
 very probable that the feminine and 
 the neuter forms were occasionally 
 confused, and that the Latins some- 
 times borrowed this designation for 
 a military phalanx, and translated it 
 by their word later, "a brick;" 
 for Jerome's version states that 
 
David's Captives 131 
 
 David led his prisoners along "in 
 the shape of a later," and it 
 seems far more probable that he 
 meant thereby, that they were in 
 the form of a military phalanx, than 
 that they were in the shape of a 
 brick. 
 
 However this may be, the cir- 
 cumstantial evidence indicates, 
 that Walton's translator took the 
 words "in the shape of" from the 
 Vulgate, and the words "a measure" 
 from an erroneous rendering of the 
 Syriac ; for they certainly do not oc- 
 cur in the Arabic text. 
 
 The Arabic version of I Chron- 
 icles xx, 3, reads : 
 
 "The people in it he brought 
 forth, and bound them in chains, 
 every one, and so he did with the 
 rest of the children of Ammon ; and 
 he did not kill a man of them." 
 
 So far as it goes, this seems a 
 shortened form of the Syriac ver- 
 sion; for the two accounts agree 
 word for word, except for the omis- 
 sion in the Arabic text of the Syriac 
 
132 Jacob's New Name 
 
 mention of "fetters of iron and bars 
 and prisons," and the final state- 
 ment, that David "removed them, 
 and made them dwell in the towns 
 of the land of Israel." 
 
 Especially noticeable is the exact 
 agreement of the two translations 
 in the assurance "He did not kill a 
 man of them." 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 The Original Record 
 
 In our study of the Bible record, 
 to learn the true nature of David's 
 treatment of his prisoners, we have 
 necessarily given special attention 
 to the Syriac and Arabic versions of 
 the texts under consideration. The 
 fact that both languages are Semi- 
 tic, and therefore resemble the He- 
 brew far more than does the Greek, 
 Latin, or any other Indo-European 
 tongue, makes these translations of 
 the Bible of unequaled value, as aids 
 in reaching a correct decision in re- 
 gard to the meaning of doubtful 
 words or phrases in the original 
 text; for the general structure of 
 these three Semitic tongues is prac- 
 
134 Jacob's New Name 
 
 tically the same, and, in many cases 
 the word used in one of them to de- 
 scribe a certain object, or to express 
 some particular thought, is so much 
 like the corresponding terms in the 
 others, that it is easily intelligible in 
 either tongue. 
 
 The Chaldaic language shares 
 this advantage with them; but the 
 targums were materially affected by 
 Hebrew traditions and doctines, 
 as well as by the common use of the 
 Septuagint among the Jewish peo- 
 ple ; while the Arabic and Syriac 
 versions were made direct from the 
 Hebrew text, and at first were com- 
 paratively free from these influ- 
 ences. 
 
 It is true that various revisions 
 have since been made, by which the 
 more modern texts have been 
 brought into greater conformity 
 either to the Chaldaic targums, to 
 the Latin Vulgate, or, more espec- 
 ially, to the Septuagint version; but 
 much of this tampering can be dis- 
 covered and removed by consulting 
 
The Original Record 135 
 
 the most ancient texts with which 
 we are acquainted. 
 
 It is not known just how old the 
 Syriac translation called the "Pe- 
 shitta" is ; but it is probably the ver- 
 sion mentioned by Melito of Sar- 
 dis, who lived in the second century 
 A. D. Back of this time Josephus 
 (Ant. xx, chap. 2, sec. 4) refers to 
 the reading of the Law by Izates, 
 king of Adiabene, who sent his 
 sons to Jerusalem to study the lan- 
 guage and learning of the Jews; 
 and there seems a strong probabil- 
 ity, that the book which the his- 
 torian describes him as reading was 
 a Syriac version of at least a por- 
 tion of the Scriptures. , Even if the 
 translation was made by a number 
 of different men, a part at a time, 
 and was not completed for several 
 hundred years, the latest portions 
 date at least as far back as the 
 earliest centuries of the Christian 
 era. 
 
 The Arabic version seems not to 
 be as ancient; but Mohammed's at- 
 
136 Jacob's New Name 
 
 qaintance with Jewish history and 
 Biblical characters, although it may 
 in part have been derived from tra- 
 ditions and scraps of religious 
 knowledge current among his peo- 
 ple, can hardly be fully explained 
 otherwise than by his possession of 
 an Arabic translation of at least a 
 part of the Bible; and a tradition 
 still prevails that in his days it was 
 the custom of the Jews dwelling in 
 Arabia to read their Law aloud in 
 Hebrew and interpret it into Ara- 
 bic for the benefit of the listening 
 Ishmaelites, just as in Palestine a 
 Chaldaic translation was similarly 
 given for the enlightenment of the 
 common people there. The text 
 printed by Walton is that of Saadia 
 Gaon, who lived in the latter part of 
 the ninth and the first half of the 
 tenth century. His translation was 
 affected somewhat by the Chaldaic 
 targums and the Syriac versions; 
 but was almost free from any direct 
 influence by the Septuagint or Vul- 
 gate. 
 
The Original Record 137 
 
 For the reasons already explained, 
 we may feel quite confident that 
 the mention of chains in both the 
 Syriac and the Arabic versions was 
 occasioned by the presence in the 
 Hebrew text of some word which 
 their translators all believed to have 
 that meaning; and, although they 
 did not agree as to just what it was 
 that David caused his prisoners to 
 "pass through," yet none of them 
 thought it to be a brickkiln. 
 
 Now let us turn to the Hebrew 
 text, and try to learn precisely what 
 it really says; representing by their 
 English equivalents all the words of 
 which the meaning is certain, and 
 using our ordinary alphabet to 
 transliterate those that are doubt- 
 ful : the result is as follows : 
 
 II. Samuel xii, 31 : "And the pop- 
 ulace which was therein he brought 
 forth and SWuM-ed BaMeGeRaH, 
 and in [or, with] ChaRiTz [plural] 
 of iron, and in [or, with] MaGZe- 
 RaH-s of iron, and made them pass 
 in [or into, or with] MaLKeN." 
 
138 Jacob's New Name 
 
 I Chronicles xx, 3 : "And the pop- 
 ulace which was therein he brought 
 forth and SWuR-ed BaMeGeRaH, 
 and in [or, with] ChaRiTz [plural] 
 of iron, and in [or with] MeGe- 
 RaH-s." 
 
 There is scarcely another state- 
 ment of the Bible so obscure and 
 difficult as this; for here we have 
 all that can be said with absolute 
 certainty as to the meaning of these 
 passages, and we are left with noth- 
 ing but human reason and conjec- 
 ture to help us reach an understand- 
 ing of the doubtful words. 
 
 On comparing the two passages 
 we will at once see that, so far as it 
 goes, the account in Chronicles is, 
 word for word, the same as that in 
 Samuel, with the exception of two 
 words, and that these each differ in 
 the two narratives only by a single 
 letter. The agreement is so close, 
 that it cannot be accounted for, 
 otherwise than by the supposition, 
 either that the account in Chron- 
 icles was copied from that in Sam- 
 
The Original Record 139 
 
 uel, or else that the two accounts 
 were both borrowed from some 
 earlier narrative. 
 
 That earlier records existed, from 
 which the historical books of the 
 Bible were partly compiled, is ex- 
 plained to us by the Scriptures 
 themselves. 
 
 II Samuel i, 18: "And David 
 . . . bade them teach the children 
 of Judah [the song of] the bow : 
 behold it is written in the book of 
 Jashar." 
 
 I. Chronicles xxix, 29: "Now the 
 utterances of David the king, first 
 and last, behold they are written in 
 the utterances of Samuel the seer, 
 and in the utterances of Nathan the 
 prophet, and in the utterances of 
 Gad the vision-seer." 
 
 I Kings xi, 41 : "Now the rest of 
 the utterances of Solomon, even all 
 that he did, and his wisdom, are 
 they not written in the book of the 
 utterances of Solomon?" 
 
 This is explained more fully in II 
 Chronicles ix, 29 : "Now the rest of 
 
140 Jacob's New Name 
 
 the utterances of Solomon, first and 
 last, are they not written in the ut- 
 terances of Nathan the prophet, and 
 in the prophecy of Ahijah the Shil- 
 onite, and in the visions of Iddo the 
 vision-seer concerning Jeroboam 
 the son of Nebat?" 
 
 That Iddo wrote another book, 
 "concerning genealogies," is stated 
 in II Chronicles xii, 15, where refer- 
 ence is also made to the utterances 
 of Shemaiah the prophet. 
 
 It will not be necessary to men- 
 tion all the numerous statements of 
 this kind occurring in the Scrip- 
 tures; but it may be well to call at- 
 tention to the frequent references, 
 all through both books of Kings to 
 "The Book of the Chronicles of the 
 Kings of Israel," and to "The Book 
 of the Chronicles of the Kings of 
 Judah," which certainly were not 
 the books entitled "Chronicles" now 
 found in our Bibles. 
 
 From Esther vi, i, it appears that 
 Ahasuerus, king of Persia and Me- 
 dia, had a "Book of Records of the 
 
The Original Record 141 
 
 Chronicles" of his kingdom, in 
 which an account of the important 
 events of his times was preserved. 
 That the kings of Israel and Judah 
 also had official historiographers, 
 who recorded such matters as 
 affected governmental affairs, seems 
 equally clear. See, for instance, I 
 Chronicles -ix, i : "All Israel were 
 reckoned by genealogies; and, be- 
 hold, they are written in the book of 
 the Kings of Israel." 
 
 II Chronicles xx, 34: "Now the 
 rest of the utterances of Jehosha- 
 phat, first and last, behold they are 
 written in 'The Utterances of Jehu 
 the Son of Hanani,' which was 
 taken up in 'The Book of the Kings 
 of Israel/ " 
 
 II Chronicles xxiv, 27: "His 
 [Joash's] sons, and the greatness of 
 the burdens upon him, and the 
 founding of the house of God, be- 
 hold, they are described in the com- 
 mentary of 'The Book of the 
 Kings.' ' 
 
 The history of recent events al- 
 
142 Jacob's New Name 
 
 ways occupies a large place in the 
 minds of the people ; but, as time 
 goes on, newer occurrences sup- 
 plant the remembrance of earlier 
 affairs, which thus lose much of 
 their former importance. In the 
 days immediately following the 
 reigns of David and Solomon the 
 people were naturally interested in 
 a fuller record of the affairs of those 
 times than would now be of use to 
 us. The same loving care of our 
 Heavenly Father which gave to 
 them the records made by His ser- 
 vants Nathan, Gad, Iddo, Abijah 
 and Shemaiah, also inspired holy 
 men of a later time, working under 
 the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to 
 pick out of these earlier narratives 
 all their truths of permanent service 
 to mankind, while the remainder, of 
 merely temporary value, was al- 
 lowed to sink into oblivion. 
 
 This is a very different thing, 
 however, from the absurd fancies of 
 the self-conceited "higher" critics, 
 whose fundamental theories are 
 
The Original Record 143 
 
 based upon the unfounded assump- 
 tion that the Bible is wholly of 
 human origin. 
 
 This apparent digression has 
 seemed necessary to explain the 
 probability, that the two accounts 
 which we have been considering, 
 found in Second Samuel and First 
 Chronicles, respectively, were 
 both copied from some earlier rec- 
 ord, and that both texts must there- 
 fore have read, originally, precisely 
 the same. Where the earliest manu- 
 scripts to which we can refer repre- 
 sent that Samuel used the verb 
 SWuM, and that Chronicles, in the 
 same place in its parallel account, 
 used the verb SWuR, it is evident 
 that the variance is due to the 
 copyist's mistake in writing out 
 one of these two passages, and 
 that the original text had the 
 same word in both places. Al- 
 though our English letters R and 
 M do not at all resemble each other ; 
 and although the same thing is true 
 in regard to the square characters, 
 
144 Jacob's New Name 
 
 borrowed from Chaldea, with which 
 Hebrew is now written, yet in the 
 earlier Hebrew alphabet, still used 
 with but slight modifications by 
 the Samaritans, these two letters 
 are much alike, and might easily be 
 confused. 
 
 In the earthly days of our Saviour 
 the Hebrew was customarily writ- 
 ten as at present; for He refers to 
 the "jot" as the smallest of the let- 
 ters (which is true in regard to the 
 square characters while in the so- 
 called Samaritan writing the I is 
 one of the largest letters) ; and He 
 also mentions the "tittle," with 
 which the square characters are 
 sometimes ornamented as an as- 
 sistance in distinguishing one letter 
 from another of very similar ap- 
 pearance; while the earlier style of 
 writing has nothing of the kind. 
 
 In fact, there is every reason to 
 believe that the Jews brought the 
 Chaldean characters with them 
 when they returned from their 
 Babylonian exile ; and, notwith- 
 
The Original Record 145 
 
 standing the fact that the earlier 
 alphabet was still remembered, and 
 was used upon coins for a number 
 of centuries later, yet the "up-to- 
 date" scholars of the time would 
 naturally prefer the more recent 
 style of writing, and would use it 
 in their manuscripts. 
 
 The confusion between the two 
 words SWuR and SWuM, in the 
 narration that we have been con- 
 sidering, therefore probably origi- 
 nated at a time but little, if any, 
 later than that of Ezra; and it 
 would necessarily be increased by 
 the fact, shown in chapter VI,. 
 that the word SWuR was at that 
 time so entirely obsolete that the 
 best Hebrew scholars failed to rec- 
 ognize its true meaning. 
 
 While in Hosea ix, 12, they attri- 
 buted to it the erroneous meaning 
 "to depart," they treated it in First 
 Chronicles xx, 3, as an entirely dif- 
 ferent word, and gave to it the 
 meaning "to saw;" being guided 
 partly by their conception of the 
 
146 Jacob's New Name 
 
 context, and partly by the occur- 
 rence in Isaiah x. 15, of the word 
 MSOR, meaning "a saw." By mis- 
 pointing this, so as to make it read 
 MaSsWoR, instead of MaShWoR 
 (which the name of this tool in 
 other Semitic languages indicates to 
 be the correct Hebrew spelling) 
 they could consider it to be derived 
 from a hypothetical, obsolete root 
 SUR: having laid this erroneous 
 foundation, they could then erect 
 upon it the theory that a verb 
 SWuR, meaning "to saw," might 
 be derived from it; and that in this 
 particular passage but in no other 
 the verb of that form should be 
 thus understood. 
 
 Unfortunately for this theory, 
 however, its application to First 
 Chronicles xx, 3, results in making 
 this passage read: "He brought 
 out the people who were in it, and 
 sawed them with saws, and with 
 harrows of iron, and with axes." Be- 
 ing unwilling to speak of "sawing" 
 with harrows and axes, our transla- 
 
The Original Record 147 
 
 tors resorted to a little verbal jug- 
 glery, and, absolutely without au- 
 thority, attributed to the verb the 
 broad general meaning "to cut" in 
 any way whatever; regardless of 
 the fact that its alleged derivation, 
 and its definition in their lexicons, 
 restricts it to the narrow specific 
 meaning of cutting with a saw only. 
 
 When considering the question 
 as to whether SWuM or SWuR 
 was the word contained in the orig- 
 inal record, we find that the former 
 not only fits reasonably well into 
 the text; but that it is also an ex- 
 ceedingly common word, which oc- 
 curs in the Bible some six hundred 
 times. On the other hand, however, 
 SWUR is a very uncommon word, 
 which, in this form (with three dif- 
 ferent meanings attributed to it), 
 occurs in only four other passages; 
 while even if we add the cases in 
 which what is really the same verb 
 appears in other forms, as SaRaH 
 or SaRaR, the total list comes to 
 only a dozen. 
 
148 Jacob's New Name 
 
 Now if the well-known SWuM 
 was the original term, there would 
 be no temptation whatever to sub- 
 stitute for it the rare and unintelli- 
 gible word SWuR; while if the lat- 
 ter was the term used in the text, 
 and its last letter was smeared, 
 blurred, or partly erased, in the 
 ancient manuscript followed by the 
 men who first made the translations 
 into Greek and Chaldaic, they 
 would be almost sure to read the 
 blurred word SWuM rather than 
 SWuR. That the Syriac and Ara- 
 bic translators found SWuR, and 
 not SWuM, in the Hebrew text of 
 the manuscripts from which they 
 translated, seems evident from the 
 fact that their rendition of the word 
 in Second Samuel xii, 31, reads 
 "threw," or "bound," which they 
 might guess to be the meaning of 
 the unknown SWuR; while they 
 must have been well acquainted 
 with the common Hebrew word 
 SWuM, and, if they had found it in 
 their Hebrew manuscripts, they 
 
The Original Record 149 
 
 could not properly translate it 
 otherwise than "put," "set," 
 "placed" or "made." 
 
 We may, therefore, feel reason- 
 ably confident, that the original 
 word was SWuR : and our previous 
 study, in the second chapter of this 
 work, has shown us precisely what 
 this means. Back of its later mean- 
 ing "to order, to command/" there 
 still remained the original, funda- 
 mental thought of "ordering" by 
 "setting in order, or arranging"- 
 the thought of assigning some spe- 
 cific duty to each of the various 
 members of a band of men. This is 
 clearly and unmistakably the mean- 
 ing in the account that we have 
 been considering. Its first clause 
 should, therefore, be read as fol- 
 lows : 
 
 "And the populace which was 
 therein he brought forth and as- 
 signed [or, detailed]" some to one 
 work or fate; some to another; but 
 each to something specific. This 
 was dimly seen by the Arabic trans- 
 
150 Jacob's New Name 
 
 lator, who added to his version the 
 statement not found elsewhere : 
 "He made them pass before him to 
 determine their fate." 
 
 The nature of the several works, 
 or fates, to which David assigned 
 his prisoners will be considered in 
 the following chapters. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 The Work of the Captives 
 
 For the reasons hereinbefore 
 fully explained, our study of the 
 passages in question has led to 
 the conclusion, which certainly 
 seems to be reasonably well estab- 
 lished, that in the original text of 
 Second Samuel xii, 31, and First 
 Chronicles xx, 3, the statement was 
 made that David brought forth the 
 populace of Rabbah and assigned, 
 or detailed, each one of them to 
 some specific work or fate, of which 
 we may expect to find a description 
 in the remainder of the account. 
 
 First comes the phrase BaMe- 
 GeGRaH : here the introduction by 
 the Syriac translators of the words 
 
152 Jacob's New Name 
 
 "in prisons" appears to indicate that 
 they understood this compound to 
 consist of BeMO "in" or "with/' 
 and GeRaH, which they seem to 
 have regarded as a variant form of 
 GeRuTh, a khan, caravansary or 
 walled enclosure. By all others, 
 however, this compound has always 
 been understood to commence with 
 the inseparable proposition '"Be"; 
 of which the fundamental meaning 
 is "in" or "within." Like the Greek 
 en, it passes over into the sense "by 
 means of"; and the Hebrew term 
 drifts further into an expression of 
 the various relations which we de- 
 note by "with," as well as into some 
 other meanings which can not be 
 thought applicable in this case. It 
 never properly means "under;" for, 
 although it is so translated in such 
 phrases as "under the wing" and 
 "the waters under the earth," yet 
 the thought expressed in the origi- 
 nal text is not correctly brought out 
 in our current versions. 
 
 In connection with the body the 
 
The Work of the Captives 153 
 
 wing forms a complete refuge, so 
 that the chick within this shelter is 
 not only protected against any evil 
 which may threaten it from above, 
 but is also fully guarded upon all 
 sides. The Hebrew phrase consid- 
 ers the chick as resting secure with- 
 in this refuge, and not as merely 
 lying under a roof which protects it 
 only from above. 
 
 The waters which our translators 
 describe as under the earth are sim- 
 ply bodies of water, each of which 
 is enclosed within the cup formed 
 by the surrounding land; for the 
 Hebrews knew nothing of the 
 ocean, and all the bodies of water 
 with which they were acquainted 
 were thus practically encircled. 
 
 The use of the preposition "un- 
 der" in an English translation of 
 the passages we are considering is 
 therefore absolutely unwarranted. 
 If the following noun is of such a 
 nature that "in" or "within" can 
 properly be used before it, that is 
 the rendering which the Hebrew 
 
154 Jacob's New Name 
 
 "Be" should here be given. If not, 
 our word "with" will almost cer- 
 tainly express the true relation, as 
 is shown by its occurrence in 
 phrases translated "With an awl;" 
 "with the ax;" "with the ox-goad;" 
 "with the mattock," etc., etc. 
 
 MeGeRaH, the remaining portion 
 of the compound in question, occurs 
 elsewhere only in First Kings vii, 
 9; where the connection shows it to 
 be the name of some kind of a tool 
 employed for cutting or dressing 
 stone. 
 
 "All these [buildings erected by 
 Solomon] were of costly stone, even 
 of hewn stone according to meas- 
 ure, GaRaR-ed with a MeGeRah" 
 not under a MeGeRaH, be it ob- 
 served. It should also be noted 
 that, if MeGeRaH meant a "saw," 
 and if the writer of Second Samuel 
 intended to state that the people 
 were sawed with saws, he would be 
 almost certain to write, as in this 
 last quoted passage, that they were 
 GaRaRed with a MeGeRaH; in- 
 
The Work of the Captives 155 
 
 stead of using the verb SWuR; for 
 Hebrew writers considered it a 
 special beauty of expression, to em- 
 ploy in close connection a noun and 
 a verb both derived from the same 
 root. 
 
 The verb GaRaR, from the root 
 of which the name of the tool was 
 derived, occurs in only the follow- 
 ing passages : 
 
 Lev. xi, 7: "The swine . . . 
 cheweth not [or, bringeth not up] 
 the cud." 
 
 Prov. xxi, 7: "The violence of 
 the wicked shall sweep them away." 
 
 Jer. xxx, 23: "A sweeping tem- 
 pect." 
 
 Heb. i, 15: "He sweepeth them 
 up in his net." 
 
 The kindred verb GaRaH means 
 "to stir up," and the noun GeRaH 
 is used to describe the "cud" of a 
 ruminating animal. 
 
 Another word which is appar- 
 ently cognate is found in its He- 
 brew use only in Isaiah xxvii, 9: 
 "He makes all the stones of the al- 
 
156 Jacob's New Name 
 
 tar as GIR stones which are shat- 
 tered." As the same word appears 
 in the Chaldaic text of Daniel v, 5, 
 and there means "plaster," our 
 translators have rendered it "chalk" 
 in their version of the former pas- 
 sage; but Isaiah apparently alluded 
 to the small chips or dust produced 
 by dressing stone. 
 
 In Exodus xx, 25, the command 
 was given : "If an altar of stones 
 thou make for Me, thou shalt not 
 build such of hewn stone; for thy 
 sword hast thou waved over it and 
 thou hast polluted it." Isaiah indi- 
 cated the complete profanation of 
 the altars erected to idols, by saying 
 that their stones should not only 
 suffer the pollution of being cut by 
 tools, but that, instead of consist- 
 ing of the hewn stones so cut into 
 shape, they should rather resemble 
 a heap of the worthless fragments, 
 chips and dust resulting from that 
 process. 
 
 Returning now to the word 
 MeGeRaH, we may regard it as the 
 
The Work of the Captives 157 
 
 name of some tool or implement 
 used for cutting or dressing stone 
 by a sweeping motion, and produc- 
 ing small chips or dust. A stone- 
 saw seems to answer this descrip- 
 tion ; and the term may therefore be 
 translated accordingly; but it does 
 not necessarily follow that the word 
 is in any way applicable to a wood- 
 saw. The latter has teeth by means 
 of which its cutting is done ; but the 
 former consists merely of a thin 
 strip of metal, held in place by a 
 suitable frame, and rubbed back 
 and forth over the stone; thus 
 grinding its way in by the attrition 
 of sand placed beneath its smooth 
 edge ; it never has teeth ; for, if it 
 were furnished with them, they 
 would be quickly dulled and ground 
 down. The resemblance between 
 the two tools is therefore merely 
 superficial, and the fact that both 
 are given the same name in the 
 English language does not justify 
 an assumption that a similar confu- 
 sion occurs in the Hebrew; while it 
 
158 Jacob's New Name 
 
 is self-evident that even the cruel 
 imagination of the most depraved 
 of mankind could hardly conceive 
 the absurd idea of employing the 
 smooth-edged stone-saw for the 
 purpose of cutting up, or mangling, 
 living human beings. 
 
 Although the noun MeGeRaH is 
 in the singular number, our transla- 
 tors have given it the plural render- 
 ing "saws." Some little excuse for 
 this may be found in the fact that 
 both in Hebrew and in English the 
 singular is sometimes used in an ab- 
 stract way, as a general expression 
 covering all or a large number of 
 things of the kind in question ; and 
 that the Hebrews carried this prac- 
 tice much farther than do we. Thus 
 a house built of many stones is de- 
 scribed in both languages as built 
 of stone; but the Hebrew went fur- 
 ther, and used such phrases as : "All 
 the people shall stone him with 
 stone," and "Every one could sling 
 stone at an hair-breadth, and not 
 miss." One more example will 
 
The Work of the Captives 159 
 
 suffice: Hosea (iv, 13) says of the 
 people of Israel, "They burn in- 
 cense upon the hills, under [Ta- 
 ChaTh,' not 'Be'] oak and poplar 
 and terebinth." This is sufficiently 
 good English; of a poetic rather 
 than a prosaic kind; yet our trans- 
 lators clearly expressed the mean- 
 ing by using the plural number 
 when describing the three varieties 
 of trees. 
 
 The Hebrew writers, however, 
 did not mix the singular and plural 
 numbers indiscriminately. If, in 
 the last-mentioned passage, the 
 word "oak" was in the singular 
 number in the original text, while 
 "poplars" and "terebinths" were 
 mentioned in the plural, the true 
 meaning would not be expressed by 
 giving the word "oak" the plural 
 form. Now in the passage under 
 consideration the word MeGeRaH, 
 "stone-saw," is singular, while the 
 following nouns, translated "har- 
 rows" and "axes" are plural. It is, 
 therefore evident that MeGeRaH 
 
160 Jacob's New Name 
 
 should not be given a plural render- 
 ing; but should be translated either 
 "a stone-saw," or else should be 
 given our best approximation to an 
 abstract rendering by using the 
 phrase, "the stone-saw" as its equiv- 
 alent. 
 
 This brings us to the second 
 word in which there is a difference 
 of one letter in the Hebrew text be- 
 tween the account in Second Sam- 
 uel and that in First Chronicles. 
 The latter gives as the third article 
 that is mentioned MeGeRaH-s in 
 the plural number precisely the 
 same word as that used in the sin- 
 gular number to describe its first 
 mentioned article. 
 
 Where MeGeRaH occurs in the 
 singular number all our translators 
 concur in rendering it "saws;" but, 
 where precisely the same word is 
 found in the plural number, the 
 same remarkable unanimity is ex- 
 hibited in translating it "axes." 
 Most wonderful transformation ! 
 One stone-saw is "saws ;" but plac- 
 
The Work of the Captives 161 
 
 ing another stone-saw beside it 
 causes them both to become "axes" ! 
 Turning now to Second Samuel, 
 we find that in the corresponding 
 passage it has the word MaGZe- 
 RaH-s instead of MeGeRaH-s. The 
 difference in the first vowel is 
 merely a matter of the Rabbis' 
 pointing: excepting this, the only 
 difference consists in the insertion 
 or omission of the letter Z. As 
 already explained, the two passages 
 must have read alike in the original 
 text. When considering the ques- 
 tion as to which one of the two has 
 correctly preserved that text for us, 
 we can hardly resist the conclusion 
 that the writer would not be likely 
 to mention the stone-saw twice; 
 first in the singular number and 
 then, almost immediately afterward, 
 in the plural. The assumption 
 therefore seems reasonable that the 
 text of Second Samuel is correct, 
 and that the error in First Chron- 
 icles is attributable to the accident- 
 al resemblance of the two words. 
 
1 62 Jacob's New Name 
 
 Yet we are not by any means 
 upon firm ground, for the MaGZe- 
 RaH is not mentioned elsewhere in 
 the Bible, and there is no tool to 
 which the speakers of any Semitic 
 language now give any similar 
 name. On the other hand, however, 
 the word seems regularly derived 
 from the root GaZaR, "to cut off," 
 "to cut in two," or "to cut down," 
 which is neither "obsolete" nor un- 
 certain in meaning. That the tool 
 in question was not an axe, properly 
 so called, seems clear; since this is 
 mentioned four times as a GaRZeN : 
 from First Kings vi, 7, it may be 
 inferred, however, that this last- 
 mentioned name was also given to 
 some tool used for working stone 
 possibly a pick-axe and this infer- 
 ence is confirmed by the ancient 
 Hebrew inscription in the tunnel 
 connecting the Fountain of the Vir- 
 gin, near Jerusalem, with the Pool 
 of Siloam. This reads, in part: 
 "Now- -this is the Hstory of the 
 excavation. While the excavators 
 
The Work of the Captives 163 
 
 were still lifting up the GaRZeN, 
 each toward his neighbor," etc., etc. 
 
 QaRDoM, which appears in four 
 other passages with the English 
 rendering "ax," is substantially the 
 same word as the Arabic QaDDuM, 
 a "hatchet;" and the inference is 
 therefore -reasonable that the He- 
 brew term also had the same mean- 
 ing. Three other Hebrew words 
 have also sometimes been rendered 
 "ax;" CheReB, a sword; KaShiL, 
 a chisel; and MaGhaTzaD, appar- 
 ently a general term for a tool of 
 almost any kind. 
 
 All that can properly be said re- 
 garding the MaGZeRaH is that it 
 was made of iron, and that it ap- 
 pears to have been a fool for cutting 
 stone "off" or cutting it "in two;" 
 in the absence of further informa- 
 tion, it may perhaps be considered a 
 species of cold-chisel. 
 
 We may now turn, back to the 
 second articles or tools that are 
 mentioned, the ChaRITz [plural] ; 
 which our translators have called 
 
164 Jacob's New Name 
 
 "harrows." First of all it may be 
 said that, whatever these may have 
 been, they certainly were not har- 
 rows ; for there is no reason to think 
 that the Hebrews ever harrowed 
 their ploughed ground before sow- 
 ing it; after the seed was sown up- 
 on the surface they used some form 
 of light harrow to cover it with 
 earth, usually merely a thorn-bush 
 or the branch of a tree. Their 
 threshing-sledge, however, was a 
 heavy wooden drag, weighted with 
 large stones, or ridden upon by the 
 driver; its underside was frequently 
 provided with projecting teeth, 
 which, in the earlier days, consisted 
 of broken pieces of pottery or small 
 blocks of basalt, about the size of a 
 walnut, securely fastened in holes 
 in the bottom of the drag, and pro- 
 truding beneath it for a small dis- 
 tance. This was called a ChaRUTz; 
 but, although this is much like 
 ChaRITz, and seems to be derived 
 from the same root, the two words 
 are not really identical, and it is not 
 
The Work of the Captives 165 
 
 safe to assume that the articles to 
 which these two different names 
 were given were really the same 
 thing. 
 
 Job (xli, 30) referring to the 
 leviathan, or crocodile, says : 
 
 " His underparts are sharp pot- 
 sherds : 
 
 He spreads a threshing-sledge 
 upon the mire." 
 
 Isaiah xli, 15: "Behold, I will 
 make thee a new threshing-sledge ; 
 a MORaG having teeth : thou shalt 
 thresh the mountains, and beat 
 them small, and shalt make the hills 
 as chaff." 
 
 MORaG was therefore the name 
 of some form of threshing-sledge ; 
 and this was the term applied to the 
 implements used by Araunah (or 
 Oman) the Jebusite, upon hi& 
 threshing floor on the summit of 
 Mount Moriah, the site of the future 
 temple. In later times this appella- 
 tion seems to have supplanted 
 ChaRUTz ; for the Chaldaic targum 
 employs MURGI to translate the 
 
1 66 Jacob's New Name 
 
 Hebrew ChaRiTzI. The words of 
 Amos (i,3) : "They have threshed 
 Gilead with ChaRuTzOTh (thresh- 
 ing-sledges) of iron," show that in 
 his days metallic teeth had in some 
 cases been substituted for the pieces 
 of pottery or basalt formerly em- 
 ployed. In the days of Saul, how- 
 ever, "there was no smith found 
 throughout all the land of Israel/' 
 and the people were compelled to 
 go down to the Philistines when 
 their tools needed more thorough 
 sharpening than could be given 
 them with a file. It therefore does 
 not seem probable that only a few 
 years later iron had become so com- 
 mon as to replace basalt and pottery 
 for the teeth of threshing-sledges. 
 
 All things considered, there is 
 but slight ground for thinking that 
 the ChaRITz, mentioned in connec- 
 tion with stone-dressing tools, was 
 identical with the ChaRUTz or 
 threshing-sledge; and the improb- 
 ability is increased by the fact that, 
 in the' only other Biblical passage in 
 
The Work of the Captives 167 
 
 which the term occurs, it seems to 
 denote a cheese. First Samuel xvii, 
 18: "These ten ChaRiTzI of milk 
 thou shalt carry unto the SaR of 
 their thousand." 
 
 Whatever may be the real mean- 
 ing of the word, it appears reason- 
 ably certain that it is the term 
 which the Syriac and Arabic trans- 
 lators understood to mean "chains;" 
 for it seems closely akin to Cha- 
 RUZ, to which our King James' 
 translators gave that rendering in 
 Canticles i, 10; the only passage in 
 which the word occurs: 
 
 "Thy cheeks are comely with 
 rows of jewels; thy neck with 
 chains [of gold]." For this the re- 
 visers substitute: 
 
 "Thy cheeks are comely with 
 plaits [of hair] ; 
 
 Thy neck with strings of jewels." 
 
 The correct rendering of the 
 whole passage is : 
 
 "To my mare of the chariots of 
 Pharaoh 
 
 Have I likened thee, my mate. 
 
i68 Jacob's New Name 
 
 Adorned are thy cheeks with 
 braids ; 
 
 Thy neck with ChaRUZ-IM. 
 
 Braids of gold will we make for 
 thee 
 
 With spangles of silver." 
 
 The ChaRUZ-IM here mentioned 
 (in the plural number) seem clearly 
 to have been some kind of orna- 
 mental attachments for the collars 
 worn by chariot-horses: just as the 
 bride's braided hair, hanging down 
 her cheeks, resembled the locks 
 plaited from the mane of these pam- 
 pered steeds, so did the ornaments 
 about her neck look like those at- 
 tached to the collars of the horses. 
 Chains they may have been; but 
 "strings of jewels" the chariot 
 steeds certainly did not wear. This, 
 however, does not enable us to de- 
 termine the true nature of the 
 ChaRiTzI of iron mentioned in the 
 passages that we have been consid- 
 ering. 
 
 Gesenius states that the word is 
 derived from a root occuring also in 
 
The Work of the Captives 169 
 
 Arabic and Syriac and meaning "to 
 puncture," "to bore" by means of 
 a sharp-pointed tool. Notwith- 
 standing the fact that there is a 
 great difference between a sharp 
 edge and a sharp point, he goes on 
 to explain that the ChaRITz of milk 
 was so called because a flat cheese 
 has the appearance of a slice. Al- 
 though unable to accept this last 
 explanation, we may, in the absence 
 of more satisfactory information, 
 define the ChaRITz of iron as a 
 pointed tool; and thus reach the 
 following statement, as the best 
 practicable translation of the first 
 part of the account in regard to the 
 action of David after the capture of 
 Rabbah : 
 
 "And the populace which was 
 therein he brought forth, and set in 
 order with the stone-saw, and with 
 pointed tools of iron and with cold 
 chisels of iron." 
 
 We can not be certain as to the 
 exact nature of the tools which the 
 captives were detailed to use; but 
 
170 Jacob's New Name 
 
 we may be sure that the meaning of 
 the original statement was not that 
 David cut his prisoners with saws, 
 or put them under harrows of iron, 
 or sawed them with axes; but that 
 he set them to work with various 
 tools, some (and probably all) of 
 which were used for dressing stone. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 Justice to David 
 
 A clue to the nature of the woik 
 to which David assigned the Am- 
 monites whom he had captured at 
 Rabbah may, perhaps, be found in 
 the statement, that the temple "was 
 built of stone made ready at the 
 quarry," and in the further informa- 
 tion, that at least a large part of this 
 preparation was performed under 
 the supervision of David: 
 
 I Chron. xxii, 14-15: "I have pre- 
 pared for the house of the Lord . . . 
 timber . . and stone . . and thou 
 mayest add thereto. Moreover 
 there are workmen with thee in 
 abundance, hewers and workers of 
 stone and timber." 
 
172 Jacob's New Name 
 
 Where did these workmen "in 
 abundance" come from? 
 
 Is it not probable that they were 
 David's captives? 
 
 We are told in Deuteronomy 
 xxix, 2, that even in the wilderness 
 the Israelites had strangers in their 
 camp; hewers of wood and drawers 
 of water. In Joshua ix, 27, we are 
 given the additional information, 
 that the inhabitants of Gilead, who 
 by deceit had induced the children 
 of Israel to enter into a covenant 
 with them, were made "hewers of 
 wood and drawers of water for the 
 congregation, and for the altar of 
 the Lord," and that this state of 
 affairs still continued at the time 
 that the book was written. 
 
 The presence among the Israel- 
 ites of bondmen, who performed 
 their rough and heavy manual la- 
 bor, had a profound influence upon 
 the national character. In a slave- 
 holding community no freeman is 
 ever willing to do such work as is 
 usually the task of bondmen; and 
 
Justice to David 173 
 
 thus the Jewish people were edu- 
 cated to work as little as possible 
 with their hands. Even down to 
 this day, the heaviest tools that 
 their poorest laborers are willing to 
 employ are usually the needle and 
 the pen. It is said in Palestine, that 
 even the members of Jewish agri- 
 cultural colonies are rarely willing 
 to do such heavy work as plough- 
 ing; but that, notwithstanding their 
 poverty, they are usually able to 
 save money enough to hire some 
 native Palestinian to do that work 
 for them. 
 
 Very few Jews can be found cut- 
 ting stone (other than precious 
 stones) to-day; and the probability 
 is strong, that in the days of David 
 the Israelites had the same unwill- 
 ingness to engage in heavy manual 
 labor that they now have. There is, 
 therefore, good reason to think, that 
 the material for the temple was, to 
 a large extent at least, prepared by 
 the captives whom David had taken. 
 
 One additional passage still re- 
 
1/4 Jacob's New Name 
 
 mains for examination; the one 
 which terminates the account in 
 Second Samuel, which was not re- 
 peated in First Chronicles : "He 
 made them pass along in [or into, or 
 with] MaLKeN." With a slight 
 change in the Rabbinical pointing, 
 this might be translated : "He made 
 them pass along with their women's 
 King;" but it seems so clear that 
 this is not what the writer meant 
 and therefore, that it is not what he 
 wrote that the Hebrew scholars 
 have ventured to change the state- 
 ment; not by altering the wording 
 of the text, which has come down to 
 them from their earliest manu- 
 scripts, but by appending a note : 
 "For MaLKeN read MaLBeN." It 
 happens that the characters for K 
 and B are very much alike in the 
 Chaldaic alphabet, which has been 
 used for writing Hebrew since the 
 Jews returned from Babylon to Jeru- 
 salem, and taking it for granted that 
 a mistake of some kind has been 
 made in copying the original text, 
 
Justice to David 175 
 
 none at first sight seems more prob- 
 able than this. All our translators, 
 as well as those who prepared the 
 Chaldaic, Greek and Latin versions, 
 and the various translations into the 
 modern languages of Europe, have, 
 therefore, been governed accord- 
 ingly. 
 
 But still the question remains as 
 to what MaLBeN means. It is evi- 
 dently a noun derived from the verb 
 LaBeN "to make brick;" for the 
 Semitic languages form nouns very 
 freely by prefixing M with a suit- 
 able vowel to their various verbs. 
 In round numbers Hebrew has some 
 three hundred and seventy-five 
 nouns of this kind, of which about 
 one hundred and fifty express the ab- 
 stract conception of the action in- 
 dicated by the verb; some seventy- 
 five are the names of places in some 
 way connected with the action ; 
 about seventy-five more are the 
 names of tools, implements, musical 
 instruments, and articles of furni- 
 ture or apparel; while the remain- 
 
176 Jacob's New Name 
 
 ing seventy-five are nouns furnish- 
 ing either the subject of the verb or 
 the object upon which its action is 
 expended. So far as the general 
 structure of the Hebrew language is 
 concerned MaLBeN may therefore 
 mean either the process of making 
 brick, the place of brick, or some 
 tool, implement or other contrivance 
 used for making brick. 
 
 In order to bring the statement 
 into general accord with the ferocity 
 attributed to David in their rendi- 
 tions of the preceding account, the 
 men who translated this passage in- 
 to non-Semitic languages havo al- 
 most universally rendered the word 
 "brickkiln." 
 
 Positive proof of their error is 
 found in the fact, that we have every 
 reason to think that the Hebrews 
 never had brickkilns. Scarcely any- 
 thing is more indestructible than a 
 burned brick ; yet in all Palestine no 
 article of this kind has ever been 
 found, which could reasonably be 
 attributed to an age earlier than that 
 
Justice to David 177 
 
 of the Roman conquest of that coun- 
 try. In fact, the noun LeBeNaH is 
 strictly applicable only to sun-dried 
 tile or brick. The root LaBaN 
 means "to be white." The moon, 
 because of the whiteness of its 
 light, was called LeBaNaH, and 
 mount LeBaNON was so named 
 from the snow sometimes to be seen 
 upon its summit. Burned bricks are 
 not white; and if it should be ob- 
 jected that sun-dried bricks are not 
 of that color either, we must remem- 
 ber that, in order to prevent the 
 walls constructed of them from be- 
 ing washed away by the rains, it 
 was, and still is, the custom to give 
 them a coating of plaster, of which 
 the whiteness is frequently restored 
 and enhanced by whitewashing. 
 Burned bricks need no protection of 
 this kind, and therefore are given 
 none. 
 
 The only mention of burning 
 brick that occurs in the Bible is to 
 be found in the account of the build- 
 ing of the tower of Babel : 'They 
 
178 Jacob's New Name 
 
 said, a man to his companion, 'Come ! 
 Let us make LeBaN-IM [sun-dried 
 bricks] and burn them to a burning.' 
 And the sun-dried bricks were TO 
 them for stones, and bitumen was 
 to them for mortar." Here it is 
 clear, that the use of bitumen for 
 mortar was so strange to the He- 
 brews that it seemed to them 
 worthy of special explanation; and 
 the same thing is true in regard to 
 the use of burned bricks, for which 
 they did not possess as much as a 
 name; so that the writer could not 
 even mention them, otherwise than 
 by describing the process of their 
 manufacture. 
 
 In Syriac to-day the word LeB- 
 NoTa, and in Arabic the term La- 
 BiN or LiBiN, means "a brick or 
 tile dried in the sun." The Assy- 
 rians applied their word LiBaN 
 only to the same article ; while they 
 called burned brick AGURRI or 
 AGURI. Either as indigenous to 
 most Semitic languages, or else as a 
 term borrowed from the Assyrians, 
 
Justice to David 179 
 
 practically the same word is found 
 in the Aramean and in the modern 
 Arabic, in which it appears as ajur, 
 ujur, or ajira. No trace of such a 
 word is found in Hebrew, however; 
 for the evident reason that the Jew- 
 ish people never used burned biicks, 
 and therefore neither borrowed nor 
 coined a word to describe them. 
 
 The Palestinian mounds show 
 that in ancient times sun-dried brick 
 formed the principal building ma- 
 terial for private houses ; hewn stone 
 being occasionally employed by a 
 few of the most wealthy of the 
 people; but burned bricks have 
 never been found. 
 
 In Egypt also, sun-dried brick 
 formed the material of nearly all 
 secular buildings, and, in the earliest 
 times, even of the royal tombs and 
 pyramids. Owing to the small pro- 
 portion of clay found in the alluvial 
 deposits of the river Nile, this brick 
 was weak and liable to crumble; 
 stubble and straw were therefore 
 mixed with the plastic material, as 
 
180 Jacob's New Name 
 
 described in the book of Exodus, for 
 the purpose of binding it together 
 and thus giving it additional 
 strength : a custom that seems never 
 to have prevailed outside of that 
 land. It is evident that such brick 
 were not intended to be burned. 
 
 The modern East still has a great 
 liking for sunburned clay as a build- 
 ing material. The Moors carried its 
 use to Spain, and the Spaniards to 
 America, where "adobe" houses and 
 walls, plastered and whitewashed, 
 may still be seen in the districts first 
 settled by that race. 
 
 But we have further proof that 
 the Hebrew word MaLBeN does 
 not mean a brickkiln; for it occurs 
 in two other Biblical passages. Na- 
 hum iii, 14: "Water for a siege do 
 thou draw for thyself. Strengthen 
 the fortifications. Go into the mire 
 and tread the clay. Make the 
 MaLBeN strong [or, grasp the 
 MaLBeN firmly]." In Jeremiah li, 
 12, we find the expression "Make the 
 watch strong" (the same verb being 
 
Justice to David 181 
 
 used in the same way as in this pas- 
 sage of Nahum's), which necessarily 
 means to increase the number of 
 men engaged in the watch. Nahum's 
 exhortation may therefore mean to 
 increase the force at work in the 
 brickyard. In Gen. xxi, 18, Ps. xxxv, 
 2, and Prov. iv, 13, the same verb is 
 used, however, with the meaning, 
 "Grasp firmly;" as the Arabic word 
 MaLBaN means a trough or mould 
 for shaping bricks or tiles, its He- 
 brew equivalent may have had the 
 same meaning, and thus the transla- 
 tion in brackets is reached. The 
 Chaldaic, Arabic and Syriac ver- 
 sions are not of much assistance ; for 
 the former reads, " Fortify thy 
 buildings;" the Arabic says, "Hold 
 the sun-dried bricks," and the latter 
 gives the exhortation, "Strengthen 
 the MuLKNa [the promise, or the 
 declaration]. The Septuagint and 
 the Vulgate say, "Lay hold upon 
 the brick." The only conclusion 
 that can be reached seems to be, 
 
1 82 Jacob's New Name 
 
 that Nahum certainly did not mean, 
 "Fortify the brickkiln." 
 
 Jeremiah xliii, 9-10 is more help- 
 ful: "Take in thy hand great 
 stones, and thou shalt hide them in 
 the clay in the MaLBeN, which is :tt 
 the entrance of Pharaoh's house in 
 Tahpanhes, before the eyes of the 
 men of Judah ; and thou shalt say 
 unto them, 'Thus says Jehovah of 
 Hosts, the God of Israel : Behold I 
 will commission and I will take 
 Nebuchadrezzar, the king of Baby- 
 lon, My servant, and will set his 
 throne upon these stones which I 
 have hid; and he shall spread his 
 gorgeous pavilion over them.' " The 
 Chaldaic interpreters evidently read 
 MeLT-BiNTH, "plaster of the 
 building," instead of MaLBeN, for 
 that is what their translation says. 
 The Vulgate reads : "Hide them in 
 the vault which is under the brick 
 wall at the entrance of Pharaoh's 
 house," and one Arabic version 
 (which probably was translated 
 from it rather than from the He- 
 
Justice to David 183 
 
 brew text) coincides; while another 
 reads : "Hide them in. front of the 
 door at the entrance of Pharaoh's 
 
 house." 
 
 The Syriac reads : "Hide them in 
 the clay in the MaLBeN [brickyard 
 or brickmould according to Wal- 
 ton's Latin translation, the officina 
 lateritia, 'the brick workplace'] at 
 the entrance of Pharaoh's house," 
 and the Septuagint says : "Hide them 
 in the prothurois at the entrance of 
 Pharaoh's house;" the prothuron 
 being the vestibule or fore-court, or 
 the inclosed space between the en- 
 trance of a house and the street 
 
 The Chaldaic and Latin versions, 
 with the Arabic text which follows 
 the latter, may be set aside as un- 
 questionably erroneous ; but the 
 Greek, the Syriac and one of the 
 Arabic versions, all agree that the 
 stones were to be placed in the fore- 
 court or inclosed space in front of 
 the entrance, a place in which it 
 would be very natural for Nebu- 
 chadrezzar, upon his arrival, to set 
 
1 84 Jacob's New Name 
 
 up his pavilion and establish his 
 throne. It certainly can not be 
 thought, either that Pharaoh would 
 permit a brickkiln to be built just 
 in front of the entrance to his pal- 
 ace, or that Nebuchadrezzar, would 
 pitch his pavilion and set up his 
 throne upon a brickkiln. 
 
 It appears, therefore, that the 
 Hebrew word MaLBeN was used 
 with the meaning "a place of brick," 
 and that it might be applied to a 
 yard enclosed by brick walls; al- 
 though this does not exclude the 
 possibility that it might also be ap- 
 plied to a brickyard, or even to a 
 brickmould. We may be sure, 
 however, that it was not used as the 
 name of a brickkiln, or anything 
 else which the Hebrews never pos- 
 sessed. If the Rabbis were correct 
 in their conjecture, that their manu- 
 scripts are all wrong in their text 
 of Second Samuel xii, 31, and that 
 MaLBeN should be substituted for 
 MaLKeN, then the passage would 
 evidently mean, that David caused 
 
Justice to David 185 
 
 some of his captives to pass into a 
 brickyard and go to work making 
 sim-dried brick. 
 
 It is not at all certain, however, 
 that they guessed correctly. If any 
 change is to be made, it seems 
 much more probable than M should 
 be substituted for the final N. Pos- 
 sibly the original text had some 
 reference to the god "MiLKoM the 
 abomination of the Ammonites," or 
 it may be that either this god, or 
 the king of the Ammonites, as the 
 recognized head of the nation, was 
 given the official title MaLKoM, as 
 is indicated by the revisers' transla- 
 tion of Jeremiah xlix, 3 : "Cry, ye 
 daughters of Rabbah ; gird you with 
 sackcloth : lament, and run to and 
 fro among the fences; for Malcom 
 [or, their king] shall go into cap- 
 tivity, his priest and his princes to- 
 gether." 
 
 It seems more probable, however, 
 that the last word of the clause that 
 we have been considering should be 
 read MaLKoM, "their king;" so 
 
1 86 Jacob's New Name 
 
 that the whole clause should be 
 translated: "And he caused them 
 to pass along [i. e., to migrate] with 
 their king." The verb GhaBaR in 
 its causative form, as here used, is 
 translated in Genesis xlvii, 21, "to 
 remove :" "As for the people, he re- 
 moved them to the cities." It was 
 undoubtedly in recognition of this 
 power of the verb, that the Syriac 
 translators, after saying that he did 
 not kill a man of them, continued: 
 "But he removed them;" and then 
 added the explanatory note: "And 
 made them dwell in the towns of 
 the land of Israel." 
 
 Additional confirmation of the 
 statement, that David did not mas- 
 sacre the inhabitants of the city of 
 Rabbah, may be found in the fact 
 that it soon afterward regained its 
 former importance; its people cap- 
 turing the territory of Gad, and 
 exulting over the downfall of God's 
 chosen race; thus bringing upon 
 themselves the denunciations of 
 Amos [i, 13-15], Zephaniah [ii, 89], 
 
Justice to David 187 
 
 Jeremiah [xlix, 2-5] a'nd Ezekiel 
 !xxi, 20, 28 and xxv, 5], 
 
 How then, it may be asked, did 
 the Jewish translators into Greek 
 and Chaldaic come to make so 
 serious a blunder? Two causes evi- 
 dently worked together to produce 
 this result. 
 
 First: They had forgotten the 
 force of the verb SWuR, and had no 
 clue to its true meaning; while they 
 had also forgotten that the word 
 for a saw, occurring in Isaiah x, 15, 
 should be pronounced MaShWoR 
 and not MaSsWoR. They were thus 
 led to the unhappy conjecture, that 
 the two words were connected, and 
 hence reasoned that the verb might 
 mean "to saw;" regardless of the 
 fact that they knew that it did not 
 have that meaning anywhere else 
 that it occurred. 
 
 Second: Their nation, once so 
 powerful among its neighbors, had 
 been brought low; yet it was the 
 delight of the Israelites to remember 
 their former glory under king 
 
1 88 Jacob's New Name 
 
 David. When translating their 
 Sacred Scriptures for the Egyptian 
 monarch, they took every oppor- 
 tunity to emphasize and magnify 
 their people's earlier importance; 
 and to this fact may be attributed 
 the origin of a number of serious 
 errors now found in our current 
 translations of the Old Testament. 
 
 It was the practice of foreign sov- 
 ereigns; notably of the kings of 
 Assyria; to glory not only in their 
 conquests, but also in the barbarity 
 with which these were accompan- 
 ied. Thus Tiglath-pileser boasted : 
 "I cut off their heads, and piled 
 them up outside their cities like 
 heaps of grain." Ashur-nasir-pal 
 recorded the following- horrible 
 cruelties among his own boastful in- 
 scriptions: "I took many alive, and 
 the rest I burned with fire. I set a 
 pile of heads over against the city 
 gate, and I impaled seven hundred 
 men on stakes." . . "Two hundred 
 men I captured alive, and cut off 
 their hands ; I flayed the governor, 
 
Justice to David 189 
 
 and spread his skin upon the city 
 wall." . . "I built a pillar over 
 against the city gate, and I flayed 
 all the chief men who had revolted, 
 and I covered the pillar with their 
 skins; some I walled up within the 
 pillar, and others I fixed to stakes 
 round about the pillar." . . "From 
 some I cut off their hands and their 
 fingers, and from others I cut off 
 their noses and their ears, and the 
 eyes of many men I put out." . . 
 "Their young men and maidens I 
 burned in the fire;" and so on, ad 
 nauseam. 
 
 It remained for the Jewish trans- 
 lators, however, in their desire to 
 magnify the greatness of their sov- 
 ereign, to invent for him the glory 
 of sawing his captives with axes, 
 and driving threshing-sledgies 
 around over them, and utilizing 
 brickkilns as a means of burning 
 them up. In this flight of fancy 
 they excelled the most barbarous 
 devices of the cruelest of heathen 
 monarchs. The fiendish chuckle of 
 
190 Jacob's New Name 
 
 the Vulgate is almost inimitable. 
 Dissecarentur et contererentur, it 
 says: "They were cut up and 
 ground up." 
 
 Let us thank God, that this is 
 but a hideous dream of the per- 
 verted imagination of erring men; 
 and that the statement which our 
 Heavenly Father gave to mankind 
 was, in substance : 
 
 "And the populace which was 
 therein he brought forth and set in 
 order with the stone-saw, and with 
 pointed tools of iron, and with cold- 
 chisels of iron; and he caused them 
 to migrate, with their king." 
 
 The correction of our translation 
 of this passage, as heretofore ac- 
 cepted, is due to the honor of our 
 God, and in a minor degree is also 
 an act of justice to David. 
 
EPILOGUE 
 
 The fifth verse of the ninety-sec- 
 ond psalm, when so translated as to 
 preserve its full force, reads: 
 "How perfect are Thy works, O 
 Lord! Deeply covered are Thy 
 purposes." While our ears ring with 
 the noise of the adherents of Ger- 
 man infidelity, shouting in shrill 
 chorus the praises of their own sur- 
 passing scholarship, we may re- 
 member that 
 
 IT IS WRITTEN : 
 
 "I will destroy the wisdom of the 
 wise, and the sagacity of the sages 
 will I set aside. Where is the wise? 
 Where is the professor? Where is 
 the questioner of this age? Has 
 not God made foolish the wisdom 
 of the world? Because the foolish 
 thing of God is wiser than men; 
 and the strengthless thing of God 
 is stronger than men." 
 
192 Jacob's New Name 
 
 Within the last score of years the 
 spade has uncovered numerous 
 buried proofs of the truthfulness of 
 God's Word, in regard to matters 
 as to which it had been impugned. 
 
 An attempt has been made here- 
 in to show that it is not by earth 
 alone that such proofs have been 
 covered; but that they are to be 
 found beneath the surface of the 
 wording of God's message to man- 
 kind. The first effort of a feeble 
 hand exposes them crowded thickly 
 together in a little group of words 
 springing from a single root 
 proofs clear and positive that the 
 fundamental assumptions of mod- 
 ern skepticism are wholly false. A 
 vast field still remains unexplored, 
 for similar researches hereafter, if 
 any think that further demonstra- 
 tion of the truth of the Scriptures 
 is needed. 
 
 FINIS 
 
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 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS 
 
 WILL. BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN 
 THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY 
 WILL INCREASE TO 5O CENTS ON THE FOURTH 
 DAY AND TO $1.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY 
 OVERDUE. 
 
 OCT 3 1933 
 
 
 OCT 4 1933 
 
 
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 LD 21-100m-7,'33 
 
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