Collated with parallel Passages of the Hebrew Scriptures. 27 



Punic Phraseology respecting the Imprecation, collated with the Hebrew 



Scripture. 



As we have thus established the identity of our conjectural reading with the 

 phraseology of the Punic text, let us now examine how far that reading and the 

 interpretation of it is sustained by parallel passages in the Old Testament on the 

 subject of imprecatory appeals to heaven against those Andrapodists by bereaved 

 parents, or denunciations against them of the vengeance of heaven, by the 

 pi'ophetic writers, conceived, moreover, in terms such" as a Tyrian might use or 

 understand. As the preceding clause respecting Hanno's bereavement was col- 

 lated with the parallel passages respecting the threatened bereavement of the 

 kings of Israel, the clause we have now to explain, the imprecation against the 

 Andrapodist, shall be collated with such passages respecting the captivity of the 

 Israelitish people as contain either their own imprecations or the divine denun- 

 ciations against those who were principals or accessories " in selling their children 

 as slaves." The passages we shall refer to are to be found scattered through the 

 Prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah, the Lamentations, and Ezekiel, the principal 

 one being in the last. The awful threatening in Isaiah, " I will profane the 

 princes, and give Israel to the curse or execration," sounded the note of alarm 

 which bade them prepare for the captivity. And Jeremy's " Voice heard in 

 Rama" on the eve of their abduction, — that wild lament of the mother of Israel 

 inconsolably bewailing the anticipated destinies of her children, was the prelude 

 to the dirge- like and elegiac strains from the pen of the same prophet in his 

 threni or keenas. In these we find the Israelites bemoaning themselves thus : 

 " They laid wait for us in the wilderness ;" " They took our sons (as slaves) ;" 

 " Thy curse upon them." While in Ezekiel again we have the divine denun- 

 ciation against the Andrapodist power that oppressed them, threatening to cast 

 him out as profane from God, and dooming him to the death of a profane 

 /Qe/ST/Aof, ^bu, or abomination, by sinking him in the sea.* 



and in the plural ibblT', and with the suffix of the third singular, inlVbn"', and with the relative, 

 irnbbrT'tt' ; in the Punic of Plautus sy'lluhu immediately before malonim Q''2'lbND, " whom may 

 they cast out as profane from the Alonim." So imTl"' is the hiphil of "n% 3rd plural Fut. with 

 the suffix. W = sea, fi^^S = viritim, 

 * Ezekiel, xxviii. 16, and 7 & 8. 



D 2 



