wilderness.

Hence we read in the first chapter of Judges

the following passages:

V. 21. And the children of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites that inhabited Jerusalem; but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem unto this day.

V. 27. Neither did Manasseh drive out the inhabitants of Beth-shean and her towns, nor Taanach and her towns, nor the inhabitants of Dor and her towns, nor the inhabitants of Ibleam and her towns, nor the inhabitants of Megiddo and her towns: but the Canaanites would dwell in that land.

V. 29 Neither did Ephraim drive out the Canaanites that dwelt in Gezer; but the Canaanites dwelt in Gezer among them.

V. 30. Neither did Zebulun drive out &c.

V. 31. Neither did Asher &c.

V. 33. Neither did Naphtali &c.

We repeatedly meet with the descendants of the Canaanitish tribes throughout all the history of the Jews. Some of the chief officers of the kings both of Judah and Israel, as Uriah the Hittite, belonged to these native races; and in I kings ix, 20-21, they are described as being very

numerous :

And all the people that were left of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, which were not of the children of Israel, their children that were left after them in the land, whom the children of Israel also were not able utterly to destroy, upon those did Solomon levy a tribute of bondservice unto this day.

It may reasonably be supposed that the Israelitish host, however numerous, when they crossed the Jordan, were yet not so numerous as all the inhabitants of Canaan, put together. Even when they had destroyed so many thousands of the natives, the remainder, most probably, still surpassed them in number. The Norman conquest of England is in many respects analogous to the occupation of the Holy Land by the Israelites. The enmity between

the English and Normans was intense, and years passed away before their animosities were allayed. Yet the Normans were remarkably few when compared with all the inhabitants of England; and their occupation of the country was as complete as that of Palestine by the Israelites. We do not find that the Normans exterminated the English. On the contrary the English have so completely overgrown and amalgamated the foreign race that no difference is now observable between the two people. Their language, also, is the same, and, what bears more closely upon our argument, the present language of England is different from the Norman-French on the one hand, and the Anglo-Saxon on the other, which were spoken by the contending parties at the time of the Norman Conquest.

In the same way, it may be argued, the language which the Israelites brought with them out of Egypt, must have come into collision, when they entered Canaan, with that which was spoken by the inhabitants of that country. The natural result is evident. A gradual union of the two would be effected,which in process of time would produce a third, different, but yet not totally different, from both. This has always happened in every country where two hostile races of people have sunk down into a quiet and peaceful population.

From the date, then, at which we have now arrived, B. C. 1421, when the Israelites entered Canaan, to the time when they were carried captive to Babylon, about 600 before Christ, nearly nine hundred years elapsed. This is a hundred years more than have passed since the Norman Conquest to the present time. Was then the language of Joshua and his invading host the same as that afterwards spoken by Hezekiah and the other kings who reigned in Israel just before the Babylonian Captivity? The question may be solved by reference to our own country. During the 800 years that have passed since the Norman Conquest

the English language has changed so much that a book written in English at the time of the Conquest would be now unintelligible to a common reader. Indeed many such books have been preserved, and they are unintelligible to all but scholars. Yet England has received no importation of foreigners since the Conquest-not even an invading army has ever remained a day amongst us, and the nations, Norman and Saxon, began from the first to amalgamate. But in the case of the Holy Land all is different. The country was continually exposed to the ravages of foreign armies, and a hundred years before the last exportations of the Israelites to Babylon, colonies of Assyrians, and a rabble of every description began to occupy the lands from which Israelitish masters had been displaced. Again, in the year B. C. 560, when the Israelitish captives who had been carried to Babylon, were all dead, leaving behind them the children which, by a law of Nature, are born even to captives and to slaves,-when these children, having reached the age of manhood, were allowed, after years of slavery, to return to Palestine, is it to be supposed that their language was still the same, after the vicissitudes through which it had passed?

I shall pursue the argument no further but briefly recapitulate the facts to which it has led us.

1. The patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, spoke the language of the Canaanites, among whom they dwelt, whatever that language may have been.

2. Jacob, by his residence in Mesopotamia, acquired a knowledge of the Chaldaic dialect which was the principal language of all his family, who were born and educated in Mesopotamia.

3. Jacob's descendants in Egypt lost their native tongue and acquired that of the Egyptians.

4. The Israelites again underwent a change or modifica

tion of their language by admixture with the inhabitants of Canaan.

5. The lapse of 900 years from the entrance into Canaan to the return from Captivity in 536 effected another change of dialect so decided, that two persons, living, one at the beginning, the other at the end of this period, could not have understood one another.

6. In conclusion, and as the consequence of the former five propositions, it follows that Moses must have written whatever he wrote, in the Egyptian language, or that what he wrote would have been unintelligible to those for whose use he wrote. So that either the Pentateuch, which we now have, is not the original work of Moses, or it is written in the Egyptian language—a theory which no writer has yet ventured to affirm.

NOTE.

The following interesting extract is from Dr Bosworth's learned work on the Origin of the English, Germanic and Scandinavian languages:

The sounds of a language, like other things, are by time subject to mutations, and these changes are homogeneous or heterogeneous, according as the cause of change is internal or external. In this way diphthongs become vowels, and vowels again diphthongs. An elaborate treatise would point out the changes in a language, if an uninterrupted succession of MSS. of different ages could be procured.

Independently of these succeeding general changes of the whole language, there are diversities existing at the same time, called dialects. The Anglo-Saxon is subject to these diversities in the highest degree, and with a free people it could not be otherwise. When a nation easily submits to

an absolute sway, individuals have little attachment to what is their own in character and opinions, and easily suffer themselves to be modelled in one general mould of the court or priesthood. On the other hand, when a nation, as the Angles and Friesians, is jealous of its liberty,and will only submit to the law enacted for the public good, while every individual regulates his private affairs for himself, the slightest peculiarity of character, unrestrained by the assumed power of any mortal, developes itself freely in the proper expressions, and every individuality is preserved. This I believe is the reason why in the province of Friesia are more peculiarites than in the other six provinces of the present kingdom of the Netherlands, and more in England alone than in the whole of Europe. Applying this principle in language, the very mirror of the soul, we find the same variety; so that among a people so fond of liberty as the Angles and Friesians, not only every district, but every village, nay, every hamlet, must have a dialect of its The diversity of dialects since the French Revolution of 1795, is much decreasing by the centralisation of power taking daily more effect in the Netherlands: the former republic, by leaving to every village the management of its domestic affairs, preserved every dialect unimpaired. Nevertheless, at this very time, those living on the coast of Eastmahorn, in Friesia, do not understand the people of Schiermonikoog, a little island with one village of the same name, almost in sight of the coast. The Hindelopians speak a dialect unintelligible to those living at the distance of four miles from them. Nay, the Friesians have still dialects with a dialect.

own.

"In the village where I was born," [says Mr Halbertoma, as quoted by Dr Bosworth, p. 37] we said indiscriminately, after, efter, and æfter, ANGLO-SAXON æfter; tar, and tær, ANGLO-SAXON tare; par and pær, A.-S. pera; tarre, and tære consumere, A.-S. teran; kar, and kær, A.-S. cyre;