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23. Behold, he drinketh up a river,' etc.-That is, he goes against a stream as if he would drink up the river with his enormous mouth-a character not applicable to a land animal, but very proper to the hippopotamus. The whole sense of this verse is clearly that the animal is amphibious.

Jordan.'-Here the name Jordan is without the usual definite article prefixed. It is not therefore the Jordan. He thinketh that he can draw up a Jordan with his mouth'-that is, not necessarily the Jordan, but any large river, such as the Jordan was at the time of its overflow; and therefore in this case the Nile might be denoted. It is certainly not definitely the Jordan; and therefore the objection urged against the claim of the river-horse, on the ground that it is not found in the Jordan, has no weight.

24. His nose pierceth through snares.'-If this were a correct translation it would seem more indicative of the elephant's proboscis, with its extraordinary delicacy of scent and touch, ever cautiously applied, than to the obtuse perceptions of the river-horse. But the verse must, we think, really be understood thus: Who can take him before his eyes (i. e. openly), or pierce his nose with a ring?' which indicates the impossibility of rendering his vast strength useful, or of bringing him into a condition of servitude. This is applicable to the river-horse, but not to the elephant; and upon a survey of the whole of these parallels the character of the river-horse so greatly preponderates, that we should have little difficulty in understanding that animal to be exclusively intended, did it not upon the whole appear preferable to regard it as a collective term for the larger pachydermata, if not for the more powerful herbivora in general.

With respect to the Behemoth, the rabbins have a singular and characteristic notion that it is a huge animal which has subsisted since the creation without propagating its kind, and which is reserved to be fattened for the feast to be enjoyed by pious Jews in the days of the Messiah. Every day he eats up all the grass of a thousand hills, and at each draught he swallows as much water as the Jordan yields in the course of six months. Such is or has been their opinion.

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CHAPTER XLI.

Of God's great power in the leviathan. CANST thou draw out 'leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord 'which thou lettest down?

2 Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn?

3 Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee?

4 Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?

5 Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens ?

6 Shall thy companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants?

7 Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears?

8 Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.

9 Behold, the hope of him is in vain: shall

1 That is, a whale, or, a whirlpool.

not one be cast down even at the sight of him?

10 None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?

11 Who hath prevented me, that I should repay him? whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine.

12 I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportion.

13 Who can discover the face of his garment? or who can come to him with his double bridle?

14 Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about.

15 His 'scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal.

16 One is so near to another, that no air can come between them.

17 They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered.

18 By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.

3 Psal. 24. 1, and 50. 12. 1 Cor. 10. 26.

2 Heb. which thou drownest. 5 Heb. strong pieces of shields.

4 Or, within.

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Verse 1.Leviathan.'-The Leviathan is often mentioned in the Scriptures: but there has been much diversity of opinion respecting the animal denoted by it. The crocodile, the whale, or some great serpent, has in turn been identified as the Leviathan of the Bible. The mass of opinion has been in favour of the crocodile, because the present description cannot with propriety be applied to any other animal; but those who have reached this conclusion have been embarrassed by other texts which by no means agree with it.

9 Heb. Sharp pieces of potsherd.

We now begin to see our way through these difficulties, and to find that these different opinions may have been all right, and that we have been needlessly troubling ourselves through the unfounded notion that only one explanation could be right, and that all others must be wrong. Gesenius has done much to give currency to a more satisfactory explanation. The word Leviathan, traced to its etymological signification, denotes an animal wreathed, or gathering itself up in folds. This general term is applied to various animals-perhaps like our word Monster '

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except that the word Leviathan is restricted by the idea of twisting or wreathing.

In Job iii. 8, and in Isa. xxvii. 1, it denotes some great and monstrous serpent. Indeed in the latter text it is twice expressly called such :

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Leviathan, the fleet serpent;

Leviathan, the coiling serpent.'

And as in this text the phrase appears to be applied symbolically to a country (Babylon) greatly to the east of the writer, it is far from unlikely that it may have been founded on some obscure accounts which had reached the West respecting the boa-constrictor of the regions still farther east; for Babylon being the most eastern country of which the Palestine Jews had any distinct knowledge, they would naturally refer to it, in loose symbolical usage, any information which reached them concerning the monsters of the far East. There is no necessity, indeed, for this reference; but it arises out of the consideration that the word Leviathan is habitually applied to monstrous foreign animals.

In all other passages, it denotes a great sea-monster particularly perhaps the whale, but not excluding any other monstrous and imperfectly known forms inhabiting the great deep. There can be little doubt that this is the meaning of the word in, for instance, Ps. civ. 26. The word probably means a whale or other large fish in the other passages in which it occurs, although, as it is in most of these used as figuratively for a cruel enemy, the particular application may be somewhat uncertain. It is worthy of remark that the Jews themselves make the Leviathan a great fish ; and as everything great became very great indeed when viewed through Rabbinical eyes, we are not surprised to find it in their accounts so great that one day it swallowed another fish which was nearly a thousand miles long. There were two, it is said, of these Leviathans at first, male and female; but as, if they had both lived and propagated, the world would have been destroyed, the female was killed and laid up in salt for the great feast of the Messiah in the latter days. The existence of whales and other 'great fish' in the seas with which the Hebrews were acquainted is a matter we shall have to consider under Jonah i. 17.

But it is now all but universally agreed, as already intimated, that the Leviathan of the present text is the Egyptian crocodile. This is so obvious, that no one could ever have attempted to make anything else of it, but from the necessity under which he might erroneously conceive himself to be of making all the Scriptural allusions to the Leviathan to centre in one and the same animal. In this case it might be and has been contended, that, although the present passage might agree best with the crocodile, yet the balance of all the passages was in favour of the whale; and that, if any one passage more clearly indicated a whale than Job xl. indicated a crocodile, then it was necessary that we should find the whale in the latter also. But when freed from the embarrassment produced by such considerations, the reader will clearly recognise the crocodile in the passage now before us. Two points-the strong armour of the animal described, and his formidable rows of teeth-are almost peculiar to the crocodile among water animals, and are wholly inapplicable to the whale, which has neither scales nor teeth, and which is in fact ordinarily taken with 'fish-spears,' the very mode against which the Leviathan is here said to be invulnerable:

'Do men in company lay snares for him?
Do they divide him among the merchants?
Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?
Or his head with fish-spears?'-(v. 6, 7.)

Again

'I will not be silent concerning his limbs,
And his strength, and the beauty of his armour.
Who can uncover the surface of his garment?
Who will approach his jaws?

Who will open the doors of his face? The rows of his teeth, how terrible! His glory is in his strong shields,

United with each other as with a close seal.'

-(v. 12, 14.)

As we write these lines an anecdote in the papers of the day meets our view, which strikingly illustrates the power of the crocodile's jaws and teeth, to which such pointed allusion is here made. It describes a party of naval officers as being assailed by an alligator while elephant-hunting in Ceylon. One of the party in selfdefence thrust bis gun into the open mouth of the assailant, and it was afterwards found that the barrel was completely bitten in two in one place, and deeply indented by the teeth of the animal in the other. With an hook.'-The particulars in the first two verses

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evidently refer to the modes of taking the leviathan. None of these processes are applicable to the whale on the one hand, or to any land animal on the other; but all to the crocodile. In the first place, they are sometimes caught by means of powerful hooks, baited with the quarter of a pig, or a piece of bacon, of which these animals are inordinately fond. This process is mentioned by Herodotus.

His tongue with a cord.'-Better, Canst thou bind his jaws with a cord (or noose); and this is well explained by the process of taking the crocodile which Thevenot has described. Pitfalls are made, and covered over in the usual manner, and into these crocodiles fall when they happen to pass over them. They are left in the cavities for several days without food, when, being weakened and subdued by hunger, ropes are let down with running

nooses, wherewith they fasten their jaws and drag them

out.

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5. Wilt thou play with him as with a bird.'—It has, we believe, been urged as one of the objections to the conclusion concerning the crocodile, that the sacred writer seems to describe the leviathan as untameable; whereas the crocodile might be, and has been, tamed. That the crocodile has been tamed is certain. At some cities, where

divine honours were paid to this animal, one was kept tame and highly venerated: Strabo mentions one of these tame crocodiles which he saw at Arsinoe. The animal allowed the priests to open his mouth and cram it with good things; and when satisfied, it would retire into an adjoining piece of water and swim about with great glee. Others, who hated the crocodile, as they of Tentyra, besides numbers they destroyed, had (according to the same author) methods of taking them captive and rendering them obedient. This seems to be attested by one of the marbles of the Townley Collection in the British Museum, which is usually explained to represent an Egyptian tum. bler exercising his feats, on the back of a tame crocodile. The knowledge of these facts, however, ought not to make us question the identity of the leviathan and crocodile; but rather to suppose either that the first part of the passage actually refers to the process of taking and taming a crocodile, or else that the difficulty of doing this is stated without the possibility being precluded. This is certainly a warranted explanation, for we have the authority of an apostle for the fact that 'Every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed and hath been tamed of mankind' (Jam. iii. 7). The Sieur Andre Brüe (in Labat), speaking of the Rio San Domingo (W. Africa), says, 'What is most remarkable here is, that the caymans, or crocodiles, such formi

CHAPTER XLII.

1 Job submitteth himself unto God. 7 God, preferring Job's cause, maketh his friends submit themselves, and accepteth him. 10 He magnifieth and blesseth Job. 16 Job's age and death.

THEN Job answered the LORD, and said,

2 I know that thou canst do every thing, and that 'no thought can be withholden from thee.

3 Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.

4 Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. 5 I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.

6 Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.

;

7 ¶ And it was so, that after the LORD had spoken these words unto Job, the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.

8 Therefore take unto you now seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and my servant Job shall pray for you:

1 Or, no thought of thine can be hindered.

2 Chap. 38. 2.

6

dable animals elsewhere, are here so tame that they hurt nobody. It is certain that children play with them, riding upon their backs, and sometimes beating them without their showing the least resentment. This may be owing to the care which the inhabitants take to feed and use them well.' See also the observation in the general note above. 13. Who can come to him with his double bridle?'-Pliny admires a bold and dangerous undertaking which the Tentyrita, and no others, dared to practise against the crocodile. They contrived to get upon its back when in the water, and when the astonished animal threw up its head, with open mouth attempting to bite them, they seized the opportunity of inserting a stake transversely between its jaws, and taking hold of the opposite ends with each hand, they held him, as it were, with a bit and bridle, and thus brought him to land as a prisoner. In this they were probably assisted by the dread which, as the same author states, the incessant assaults of the Tentyritæ had inspired the crocodiles for the very voice and smell of these people (Hist. Nat.' viii. 25). The probability of this anecdote is strengthened by that which we have given in the preceding note; and it is perhaps confirmed by the marble in the Townley Collection there mentioned; for, although generally supposed to represent an Egyptian tumbler on the back of a tame crocodile, it seems to us far more probable to commemorate this hazardous feat of the people of Tentyra.

18. His eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.—The ancient Egyptians employed the eye of the crocodile as an hieroglyphic to denote the rising of the sun. Not that the eyes of this creature are of remarkable size or brilliancy; but because, as is stated, its eyes become first visible when it rises above the water.

for him will I accept: lest I deal with you after your folly, in that ye have not spoken of me the thing which is right, like my servant Job.

9 T So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite went, and did according as the LORD commanded them the LORD also accepted *Job.

10 And the LORD turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends: also the LORD 'gave Job twice as much as he had before.

11 Then came there unto him all his brethren, and all his sisters, and all they that had been of his acquaintance before, and did eat bread with him in his house and they bemoaned him, and comforted him over all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him: every man also gave him a piece of money, and every one an earring of gold.

12 So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses.

13 He had also seven sons and three daughters.

14 And he called the name of the first, Je4 Heb. the face of Job.

3 Heb. his face, or, person. 5 Ileb. added all that had been to Job unto the double.

mima; and the name of the second, Kezia ; and the name of the third, Keren-happuch.

15 And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of Job: and their father gave them inheritance among their brethren.

Verse 11. Then came there unto him all his brethren,' etc.— The practice involved in this text appears to be well illustrated by an analogous custom among the Hindoos, for the knowledge of which we are indebted to Mr. Roberts, who spent fourteen years among them. When a man has suffered a great loss, by an accident, by want of skill, or by the roguery of another, he goes to his brothers and sisters, and all his acquaintances, and describes his misfortunes. He then mentions a day when he will give a feast, and invites them all to partake of it. At the time appointed they come, arrayed in their best robes, each having money, earrings, finger-rings, or other gifts suited to the condition of the person in distress. The individual himself meets them at the gate, gives them a hearty welcome, the music strikes up, and the guests are ushered into the apartment prepared for the feast. When they have finished their repast and are about to retire, they each approach the object of their commiseration, and present their donations and best wishes for future prosperity.

— ‘A piece of money.'-The word is n kesitah, which most of the old versions render by lamb.' The word is of very considerable importance from the inferences deducible from its use. It occurs only in three places; first in Gen. xxxiii. 19, where it is said that Jacob gave a hundred kesitah for the parcel of ground which he bought of Hamor; next in Josh. xxiv. 32, in a retrospective reference to the same transaction; and, lastly, in the present text. That it does not elsewhere occur than in reference to the time of Jacob, supplies an argument of some force in support of the opinion to which we have all along inclined, that the time of Job must be fixed in or about the time of Jacob.

But the principal interest associated with the word arises from its connection with the history of money. It is not, however, as we have seen, invariably conceded that the kesitah does mean money, but literally 'a lamb.' In the present text it might very well be understood of a lamb, were it not that it is mentioned along with an ear-ring of gold.' But in Genesis the kesituh was clearly a measure of value and a medium of exchange. Even so, a lamb might still be intended; for we know that in the early history of all nations, sales and purchases were effected by exchanges a person giving that which he could spare from his own possessions for that which he wanted of another's. Under this system certain common articles became measures of value. A hunting people would speak of commodities as being worth so many skins; a pastoral people as being worth so many sheep, and so on. Therefore Jacob, who was rich in flocks and herds, might certainly have given a hundred lambs for the land of Hamor, and that he did so has been the opinion of many. However, he did not do so; for we are told in Acts vii. that he gave a sum of money,' shewing that the kesitah was not a lamb, though called such. Then why was it called such? and what were these pieces of money? We know that silver had become a medium of exchange, in the time of Abraham; and we know also that, when the precious metals became the representatives of value, they continued for a long time to be weighed. So in Scripture, when Abraham bought the field of Machpelah of Ephron the Hittite, he weighed out four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant.' The last expression doubtless refers to the quality of the 688

16 ¶ After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons* sons, even four generations.

17 So Job died, being old and full of days.

silver. Joseph's brethren also, when returning from Egypt with corn, found their money in full weight, as they had taken it thither, in their sacks. Yet although thus, before and after the time when the kesitah is first mentioned, we find money delivered by weight, it is a very common opinion that the kesitah was a coin bearing the figure of a lamb, and thence deriving its name. This is probable or improbable merely with respect to time; for cattle having been the usual representative of value, the first coins in many nations bore the figures of animals by which values had been estimated, and from which these coins took their names. Thus the most ancient money of the Greeks and Romans bore the figure of an ox. Yet it is certain that we cannot in any nation trace the existence of coined money higher than to a period long-very long-posterior to the times of the patriarchs, nor are there any other intimations in the early books of Scripture of its existence: and we cannot concur in the conclusion that the kesitah was a coin, or that the patriarchs had any coins. Yet as, to save the trouble of continual weighing, it was an obvious idea to divide the metal into determinate portions of a certain weight and assigned value; and as numerical quantities of metal are mentioned without weight being stated-as when Abimelech gives Abraham a thousand (pieces,' usually supplied in our version) of silver,-we are disposed to regard it a good medium alternative, to suppose that the kesitah was a quantity of silver equal to the average value of a lamb, and thence receiving its name. Although not coined, it may have borne some mark to denote its value and character. As such pieces could not claim the coufidence reposed in coined money, they were probably weighed in masses when large sums were in question; and this is a supposition which will obviate some of the difficulties by which the subject has been perplexed.

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14. ‘Jemima .... Kezia.... Keren-happuch.-These names are very characteristic, and are exactly of the same class as are at the present day given to women in the East. The first name, Jemima, according to the Targum, means day;' or may as probably have the signification of 'turtle' ordove,' which it bears in the Arabic language. The second is cassia-the aromatic of that name. And the third appears to be correctly rendered by the Vulgate, cornu-stibii- the horn or vessel of stibium,' that is, of paint, such paint as the eyes were adorned with. All these names are in exact conformity with the present usages, in which the names of females are taken from whatever is considered agreeable and beautiful-flowers, fruits, gums, perfumes, precious stones, and the like. The last name is the most singular. It is one of the characteristics of the Orientals that they do not keep in the background the materials and instruments of personal adornment, but obtrude them on every occasion, as objects calculated to suggest agrecable ideas. Hence the vessels containing paints, unguents, and perfumes, give names to females, supply images to poetry; and painted representations of them, with their names inscribed upon them, occur equally with representations of flowers, on the walls of palaces in the East. It is also observable that this custom, of painting the eyes, should have existed at so very early a period as the name of Job's daughter intimates. Yet we know that it existed in the time of the kings (see the note and cuts under 2 Kings ix. 30); as also among the ancient Egyp tians.

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