Mr. Poke's Remarks on Mr. Carter's Paper on Gopher-wood. 281 



the verb ' to cover,' — would be erroneous: and it may be 

 added that (independently of* all other objections to it,) Mr. 

 Carter's suggestion that kopher means cypress, must, upon his 

 own reasoning, be wholly untenable, for not one passage can 

 be found in Scripture in which kaphar has the particular im- 

 port of ' to cover with cypress'. 



Indeed, if there be any word which has attached to it a fixed 

 and unequivocal meaning, it seems to be this word kopher 

 (Gen. vi. 14.), which, as far as my information extends, is not 

 attempted to be rendered otherwise than by the word ' pitch', 

 in any version of the Bible, excepting in that of Mr. Bellamy, 

 — the authority of which version, however, I may be allowed 

 unqualifiedly to dispute. But it is not necessary to depend 

 solely upon the received translations for the determination of 

 the true signification of this word, seeing that the Arabic .s£, 

 the Chaldee "1313, and Syriac j^ao, are all employed to ex- 

 press the same word ' pitch'. Nor does the proof of its mean- 

 ing rest even here ; for we find the Hebrew word HHD3 



O ' • : T 



[gophrith\ brimstone, — in Arabic ^^ >_»£, in Chaldee J"V*""013» 

 and in Syriac jA.; o->. — which word is evidently derived from 

 **l2j or "1D3 in its secondary signification of pitch, on account 



of the resemblance, however partial or indirect, of the one 

 substance to the other, and not from its primary meaning ' a 

 covering', with which brimstone cannot possibly have any 

 connexion. 



The process of the derivation of the word gophrith may be 

 thus stated. The vegetable pitch with which Noah's ark was 

 covered, was that substance to which the name of kopher, or 

 gopher, was applied in the first instance: this name was after- 

 wards (as, in fact, has been the case with its English repre- 

 sentative ' pitch',) extended to the Asphaltus, or mineral pitch ; 

 and from the resemblance which brimstone bears to asphaltus, 

 not only in its mineral origin, but also in the effect produced 

 upon it by heat, the former substance thence derived its ap- 

 pellation, as being 'a substance like gopher'. 



The opinion advanced by Mr. Carter, that mineral rather 

 than vegetable pitch was the product of the country where 

 the ark was built, and that, in fact, the pitch obtained from 

 wood could scarcely have been known to Noah, is founded 

 upon the assumption that the situation of that country was 

 in the neighbourhood of Babylon, and also that society in 

 that early time existed in a state of infancy as regards its 

 culture and knowledge. On the latter point I will refrain 

 from saying more for the present, than that I apprehend the 



Third Scries. Vol. 4-. No. 22. April 1834. 2 O 



