NOTICE. The Reader will find that each volume after the first has a double paging, the top series of figures being limited to the individual volume, the bottom one running on through each four volumes, which will thus ultimately form one, with a continuous paging, and new title-pages and contents. Thus each subject is completed in a single volume, but the whole of the twelve volumes will be so arranged as to form an unbroken work, in three thick volumes -AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. The following have been published :— 1. THE ENGLISH BIBLE; How to read and study it. 2. THE SYMBOLICAL AND FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE OF THE BIBLE. 3. THE BEAUTIES AND PECULIARITIES OF STYLE IN THE Bible. 4. MODERN INFIDELITY AND BIBLIOPHOBIA. 5. BIBLICAL NATURAL HISTORY; Astronomy, Geology, and Botany. 6. BIBLICAL NATURAL HISTORY; Zoography. 7. SCRIPTURE DIFFICULTIES, REAL AND IMAGINARY. 8. AN EXAMINATION OF SCRIPTURE DIFFICULTIES; The Pentateuch. Vol. XI., AN EXAMINATION OF SCRIPTURE DIFFICULTIES; THE COMPLETION OF THE GOSPELS, will be published on the 1st of September, and the succeeding volume, on the 1st of October. Titles, Contents, and Indexes to the entire work will follow, and will supersede the Title and Contents to each separate volume. In addition to what is there written, we may observe that the Hebrew word shopetim, here rendered "pots, may mean the long, parallel fissures in the rocks, or deep valleys and glens, with opposite and corresponding parts; or subterraneous passages, which resemble works of art from the order of their arrangement, in either of which discomfited troops might hide themselves. The sense of this very difficult passage will then be: "Though ye have been forced to seek shelter among the rocks, and have been polluted with smoke and dirt; yet ye shall soon assume the splendidness of victory and triumph; ye shall resemble, not only the gay appearance of the Assyrian banners, but the gorgeous, out-spread wings of the dove that are displayed on them." This interpretation will appear the more probable, if it be considered that the Jews, when they formed any grand procession for the purpose of celebrating victory or offering praises and thanksgivings to God, were clothed in white. PSALM LXIX. "They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink. Let their table become a snare before them and a trap. Let their eyes be darkened, that they see not; and make their loins continually to shake. Pour out thine indignation upon them, and let thy wrathful anger take hold of them. Let their habitation be desolate; and let none dwell in their tents. Add iniquity unto their iniquity: and let them not come into thy righteousness. Let them be blotted out of the book of the living, and not be written with the righteous.”— Ver. 21-28. THIS is one of the psalms that have been scoffingly called "cursing psalms," and which have been declared to be in opposition to all our ideas, not only of the Divine goodness and mercy, but of those traits of benevolence and charity which are the characteristics of all good men. That the interpretation which this implies is a false one is certain from the fact that this psalm is expressly appropriated by our Saviour as a prophecy of the extremity of his sufferings, and of the derision to which, in that extremity, he should become subject. And it is reasonable to infer that if there is nothing incompatible with all proper views of the Divine Being, and all proper conduct and disposition in His people in this psalm, so there is nothing incompatible with them in those other psalms in which similar expressions occur. As to the precise import of such expressions as those in the text, it has been observed that they are to be considered not as prayers but as predictions, the imperative mood being put for the future tense, agreeably to the known idiom of the Hebrew language (see Gen. xx. 7; xlii. 18; xlv. 18; Isa. vi. 10; Jer. i. 10), and shown to be so by the future being used in other parts of the prediction, as in Ps. xxviii. 4, 5. This idiom is more natural in prediction than in other kinds of composition, because it is the immediate result of combining idioms common in the prophetic style. Again, as the prophets are often commanded to do a thing, when it is only intended that they should foretell it, so they often foretell a thing by commanding it to be done (Isa. vi. 10; xlvii. 1, etc.); and they often express their predictions in an address to God (Isa. ix. 3), and the union of the two idioms gives them the appearance of imprecations. Of all those tremendous imprecations which appear in the English version of Deut. xxvii. 15 – 26, there is not one authorised by the original. The Hebrew texts express no kind of wish, but are only |