Assuming the hypothesis, as proved, that the Hebrew of the Old Testament is only a dialect of Phoenician; it remains to point out others of its allies. The Biblical term for this language is Aramaic : Hebrew, '; the word being derived from Aram, a son of Shem, Gen. x. 22; so that Aramaic is Phoenician, and Phoenician is Hebrew, more or less, just as the dialect of Austria is German, the dialects of Saxony and of Prussia are German; and all are more or less allied to the low Dutch of Holland. From this primitive Aramaic, now lost, have branched out the ancient Chaldee, which we find so much interwoven with Hebrew, more especially in the Book of Daniel; the modern Syriac, and the Arabic: all are called Semitic, or SyroArabic. Of these, Arabic is by far the most widely diffused, owing, no doubt, to the immense development it has received from the impulse of Moslem propagandism.

III.

Starting then, with this basis, we will proceed to examine some of those passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, which dwell upon recognised distinctions of speech.

1. In Judges xii. 6, we find that those descendants of Manasseh who were called Gileadites, had established a different pronunciation of the letter s from that of the tribe of Ephraim; this was tested by the use of the word shibboleth, when fugitives of the tribe of Ephraim sought to escape by the fords of the Jordan; the victorious Gileadites asked them to utter ny, a Hebrew word for "a stream of water," and the divergence of sound betrayed them to the opposite party; the sh of one party was s to the other. It is so with the word which we call Samaria-Shomeron in Hebrew, and Shechem Sychar.

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2. In 2 Kings, chap. xviii, and Isaiah xxxvi., we have a narration

of the circumstance of Rab-Shakeh, an envoy from Sennacherib, King of Assyria, to Hezekiah, King of Judæa, who makes a defiant speech within full hearing of the populace; he had chosen to speak in '', the local dialect of Judæa, as distinguished from that of the allied speech of the Israelites, which was Samaritan; and Eliakim, from motives of policy, urges him to speak in pure Aramaic, which he refuses to do. This shows us that the Aramaic of Judæa differed from the Aramaic of Assyria; but we do not know to what extent they differed.

3. In Daniel we find that Chaldee shows a tendency to supersede the native dialects of Jerusalem; but Chaldee, as it has come down to us, is Semitic; i.e., it is Aramaic in a different patois, and what is more important, it is in a different character; for here we finally lose the old Phoenician letters, and first become acquainted with the alphabet now in use, called square Hebrew. The word Chaldee, itself, has no existence, in the Old Testament, being represented by Casdim, Hebrew: D'TW).

Daniel was an intelligent young Hebrew, selected, with others, to acquire "the learning and the tongue of the Casdim." (i. 4.) In ch. ii. 4, the Casdim speak to King Nebuchadnezzar in Aramaic; in ch. v. we find a narration of the circumstances of Belshazzar's fall being predicted by supernatural writing on the wall of his palace, which Daniel interprets. The words of the inscription, as we know it, are pure Chaldee:

,Mene מנא,Mene מא ,Tekel תקל

NUMBERED,

WEIGHED,

DU-peresin.

and DIVIDED. v. 25.

In explaining the words, and applying the meaning to the case before him, Daniel dwells upon the analogy between peresin, the Hebrew and Chaldee for "divided," and the similar word "Persians," thus:

פרס

"God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it."

"Thou art weighed in the balances and found want

peres. "Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes. and Persians."

v. 28.

4. The Book of Daniel having shown us the influence of captivity in modifying the national dialects of Judea, the Books of Nehemiah and Ezra will conclude our illustrations drawn from the Old Testament.

The remnant return (B.c. 536), but the language of the Pentateuch has to them become archaic, as is the language of Alfred the Great, or of Chaucer, to us. In Ezra iv. 7, we find that the malcontents wrote to King Artaxerxes complaining against Nehemiah, a letter written in Aramaic characters, and translated into Aramaic. In Nehemiah, chap. viii., we find that Ezra, having collected the sacred writings together, had the Jewish law publicly read, "and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading," v. 8. The probability is that this refers to the Pentateuch as we now have it, in square Hebrew, which was explained in the dialect now called Syro-Chaldee; and it gives a precedent by which to understand the similar procedure of Christ at Nazareth, described in Luke iv.: but we are anticipating. In Nehemiah, chap. xiii., we find that the returned Jews (B. C. 434) intermarried with the native tribes, and their children by that means acquired a mongrel tongue, "half in the speech of Ashdod, and did not know how to speak in the Jewish language, but according to the language of each people," v. 24. Ashdod, called also, Azotus, now Esdud, was an important city of Philistia, and this difficulty would arise from mingling Syriac and Arabic in the present day.

IV.

The Apocrypha contains, in the Book of the Maccabees, one of the most glorious illustrations of patriotism that is known to mankind; all that history or fable record of Tell and Hofer, of Wallace and of Bruce, of Washington or of Kosciusco, is surpassed by the heroic struggle of the Asmonean princes.

1. The canon of the Old Testament closes with the Book of Malachi, B. c. 397; the era of the Maccabees commences, B. C. 167. In that interval Syria had been conquered by Alexander the Great, B. C. 333, and his power was delegated to Seleucus Nicator, who died, B. c. 281, after which date Jerusalem became a frequent object of contention between the Ptolemies, settled in Egypt, and the Seleucides at Antioch. In or about B. C. 277, the Greek version of the seventy elders, called the Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, was collected or translated in Egypt; this appears to have been done as a matter of literary curiosity by order of the Emperor Ptolemy Philadelphus, who founded the celebrated public library at Alexandria. It was effected at an enormous expense, and, apparently, under compulsion.

2. The gross cruelty and oppression exercised in Judæa by Antiochus IV., called Epiphanes, or the "illustrious," B. c. 175-167, roused the Maccabees to revolt; and here commences chap. i. of the 1st book year 137 of the Grecian Empire, being 175 B. C. The whole story of the Maccabees represents a living protest or reaction against the encroachments of Hellenistic innovation, called Gentilism, under the Seleucida; and it is nothing, unless we understand that the Maccabees struggled, and that successfully, to retain their national customs, their national religion, and their national language their own native speech, a privilege so dear to all patriotic

souls that speech was Syro-Chaldee; their letters in the so-called Samaritan character, the rolls of their scriptures in square Hebrew.

3. The Samaritan of the Maccabees, B. c. 140, as shown upon these coins, is the oldest form of Hebrew writing that has come down to us: we have nothing in square Hebrew to show of so old a date; all inscriptions older than B. C. 150, are in what is now called Phoenician. In chap. vii. book 2, we read, with admiration, of the noble constancy of a mother and her seven sons; and find that King Antiochus did not understand the native speech of Judæa, for, as he listened to the mother exhorting "every one of them in her own language," v. 21, he, "Antiochus, thinking himself despised, and suspecting it to be a reproachful speech," v. 24, evidently did not understand its purport. There is no absolute statement that this persecuted family spoke Greek at all; in v. 8, one of the sons

answered in his own language, and said, 'No,"" v. 8: clearly the answer must have been translated to the king, who was present throughout; and if so in this one instance, where the act of translation is not recorded, it may be taken as the rule for all. The point is not clear; but it is certain that the family spoke a

It is right to add that Mr. Madden, on the authority of M. Levy, attributes this coin to Simon, son of Gioras, A.D. 66-70. See Jewish Coinage, p. 167. The wording is in an abbreviated form: S for shenat; B for 2nd year; Lc-H-R-Laherout; Isarl for Israel.