180 Mr.W. G. Carter on the Gopher-wood 



and the floor with cedar, Htf {erez), but covered the floor of 



the house with planks of fir (vero'wsh). 1 Kings vi. 15. We 

 find fir wood the most suitable for musical instruments: vero'wsh 

 also was so employed ; " David and all the house of Israel 

 played on all manner of fir wood (vcroicsh) instruments." 

 2 Sam. vi. 5. In a few passages we have the tree "lilTD 



{tidhar). Isa. xli. 19. " I will set in the desert the fir tree 

 (verawsh) and the pine [tidhar) :" probably affording the ety- 

 mon of the Latin teda, the heart of a pine, a torch. 



The cedar, Htf (erez), seems particularly well defined, and 



is often named in the Old Testament. It was eminently the 

 tree of Lebanon. It was fragrant : " the smell of Lebanon," 

 4Cantic. It was a noble lofty tree. Ez.xxxi. "A cedar in Leba- 

 non, with fair branches and with a shadowing shroud, and of 

 an high stature. The fir trees were not like his boughs, nor any 

 tree in the garden of God was like unto him in his beauty." 

 When Maundrell visited Lebanon there were not many left, 

 but enough to identify the tree. A few were of immense size. 

 " There are some of them," says Mr. Buckingham (Travels), 

 u ten or twelve feet diameter in the trunk, with branches of cor- 

 responding size, each like a large tree, extending outwards." 



Then if it were neither the fir, the pine, nor the cedar, what 

 was the Kopher tree? Dr. Hales considers it was the cy- 

 press. " Probably," says Taylor on this word in his Hebrew 

 Concordance, " the cypress, a tree with a straight, smooth, 

 long stem, and every way fit for building the ark." There 

 are, however, two varieties of the Cupressus sempervirens, and 

 one of them is a spreading tree. But that the cypress was 

 the tree, can we at this remote period expect much better 

 assurance than in the name having been continued from the 

 Hebrews through the Greeks to the present time? Kopher, 

 or Icoivpher, (the^? and ph being in Hebrew the same letter,) 

 would be xv7rpo(, or with ss servile, xu7rapj<r<roj, in Greek, whence 

 The Latin cupressus, and thence our ' cypress '. And the cy- 

 press tree was, as Taylor observes, every way fit for the 

 purpose. The wood has a healthful odour, is extremely hard, 

 yet elastic, it resists the worm, and is considered even su- 

 perior to cedar. It is a tree of a warm climate, and is met 

 with in China and many parts of Asia, and in the Levant. 

 Thucydides (near 500 years B.C.) mentions (1. 2.) a public 

 funeral at which the bones of the warriors were placed in 

 Xapvaxag xwapKrostvas, chests or coffins of cypress, and the 

 coffins of the Egyptian mummies are generally of this material. 

 The cypress-wood doors of old St. Peter's at Rome, placed 

 there by CotlStantme, were said to have shown no signs of 





