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"The mighty dead are pierced through; The waters from beneath, and their inhabitants."*

And on this, the only remark he thinks necessary to make, is, that he " agrees with Scott, that are the giants, and wicked inhabitants of the old world, who perished in the flood, produced by breaking up the waters from beneath, or the fountains of the great deep as Moses calls them, Gen. vii. 11.

Now, admitting, for the sake of argument, that the antediluvian giants, who with the wicked inhabitants of the old world were overwhelmed by the flood, have been here intended

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May it be permitted, in transitu, to ask, what possible meaning can be assigned to these two lines? Is it, that the waters are pierced through, as well as the mighty dead? And do their inhabitants mean the fishes? And is it meant, that they are also pierced through? And what is intended by the waters from beneath? from beneath what?-It should be remarked, that although in the reference to Scott, which is mentioned above, it seems as if the Bishop had adopted these strange phrases in common with that writer, yet the case is not so; they have nothing in common but the meaning of the word 'D. The Bishop is original, almost throughout the whole verse, especially in the expression of "the waters from beneath;" the Hebrew necessarily requir ing, (as will appear immediately upon inspection,) that the word beneath, whether it be construed in connexion with the waters or not, must precede: that is, if the two words are to be combined, it must be "beneath the waters," just the opposite of his Lordship's collocation.

נפלים

by the epithet DND, Rephaim; there arises from this very circumstance a proof, that the inference which the Bishop would hence deduce, respecting the priority of Moses to the author of this poem, is a false one. For those giants of the old world are called by Moses O, Nephilim; and, in no one instance, by the name of Rephaim, which is here applied. So that if we really have, in this place, an allusion to those giants who lived before the flood, we must suppose the knowledge of the writer to have been derived from some source different from the writings of Moses: a conclusion, directly the opposite of that, which it has been the Bishop's object to establish. His Lordship indeed tells us, that he expects, not to be called upon "to prove, that the author of the poem derived his knowledge of events, from a history of so much notoriety as that of Moses, rather than from oral or any other tradition."-But surely, in facts so notorious as those of the deluge, and of the existence of those giants and wicked men who preceded it, it cannot be thought too much to demand, that some marked similitude between the accounts given of them by Moses and by any other early writer should be adduced, in proof that either borrowed from the other. At all events, it is clearly too much on the other hand to expect, that this should be conceded, in defiance of a marked dissi

militude, such as has been shewn in the present case to exist. And after all, even were a resemblance discoverable, the question, which was the earliest writer, would still remain exactly as before.

The

The Bishop, in truth, on the word Rephaim, is altogether at variance with himself. phrase "mighty dead," which he here uses for Rephaim, is the same which (after Bishop Lowth) he has employed in Isaiah xiv. 9. for the same Hebrew word. But the explanation of the term which he has there given, he states to have originated with Rosenmuller, (or rather he should have said with Vitringa, for from him Rosenmuller has taken it,) and is altogether different from that which he has here borrowed from Scott. His words there are:-" REPHAIM,

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the gigantic spectres. Ghosts are commonly magnified by vulgar terror to a stature superior to the human. Rosenm.”—Stock's Isaiah, p. 40. -Thus then, we find, that Ghosts, as such, are magnified by vulgar terror, and may be called Rephaim. And so, the appellation, mighty dead," or Rephaim, becomes applicable to all the inhabitants of the invisible world. But how then can that, which is represented as a quality of the shades of all dead men, namely gigantic size or Rephaism, be considered in this place as designating the spirits only of a particular class of human beings, who, being of actually gigan

tic stature, had lived before the flood? The two expositions meet, with such adverse fronts, that I despair of being able to reconcile them.-Non nostrum tantas componere lites.

It should not be suffered to pass unnoticed, that in the passage of Job, with which we are at present concerned, there occurs, besides the word Rephaim, another term of considerable moment; to the true nature and meaning of which the Right Rev. translator has by no means paid that attention, which the office assumed by him demanded. The term I allude to is *, Sheôl: a term in whose signification

* It had been well, if the Bishop had attended somewhat more to those learned investigations of the import of this and other difficult terms, which are to be found in Mercer, Schultens, Peters, and the other laborious Commentators, whose cautious researches have only excited his disgust. We should then not find that uncertainty of meaning, which at present attaches to his Lordship's translations of the passages in which such terms occur. The word in particular, which is here referred to, has been rendered by him, in different places, with such variety and such vagueness, as to leave the reader altogether ignorant of the sense, which the translator conceives most properly to belong to it. Of eight places in which it occurs in the book of Job, and of ten places in the prophecy of Isaiah, there is no one, in which the Bishop has taken occasion to give a precise idea of its true signification. Sometimes he calls it "the lower region," (Job vii. 9. xiv. 13. xxiv. 19.) at others, "hell," (Job xi. 8. Isai. xiv. 9.) again," the grave," (Job xvii. 13. 16. xxi. 13. Įsai. v. 14. xiv. 11. 15. xxviii. 15. 18. xxxviii. 10. 18.) again,

is involved a question, no less important than that of the early belief entertained by the people of the East, concerning the existence of the soul

in the present passage, "the lower world;" and again, Isai. lvii. 9. the lowest pit." Amidst all this variety of application, not a single glance, that I can discover, has been taken at the radical meaning of the word, except in one passing remark, in a criticism, which is of so extraordinary a nature, that I cannot avoid quoting the whole of it, as it stands. -It is a note on Job, xx. 9.-" Which beamed on him.] now. The reader, who shall take the pains to examine the several Hebrew roots commencing with the letter w, will be apt to think with me, that the original sense of by far the greatest part of them, may best be discovered, by divesting them of this same initial letter, which stood in the place of an article or preposition, merely. Thus wow, the sun, I conceive to the the feeler, who feeleth after and investigateth all things: pw, the heavens, the place of waters, from which rain, or waters, come; sw, the place of the insensible, Sheol or Hades. And thus may the verb before us,

w,

, be traced to ND, of which we want an example, but it probably signified to SHINE, as from it" (that is, from a non-existing word, observe,) is derived I, PITCH."!!!— These notes of admiration convey but little of my own astonishment. Surely, such another perfect specimen of adven. turous criticism, the entire regions of conjecture can scarcely supply. In truth, this is such an exercise of the critical faculty, as, were it indulged in, must render the Hebrew scriptures a perfect nullity, by fastening on them any sense that any guesser might think proper to affix.

That the prefix w, as an abbreviation for the relative N, is not unprecedented, is well known to Hebrew scholars: but, at the same time, this is acknowledged to be a Chal,

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