228 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1705. 



man should bring to any antiquary a good MS. copy of the Hebrew Bible, 

 Pentateuch, or Psalter, written in a small common letter, without points, fine 

 knots, flourishes, pictures, and great letters, or any thing that should look 

 pompous: suppose that the ink, parchment, &c. should carry a seeming face of 

 antiquity with them, and that a man should say his MS. was lOOO, 1200, or 

 1300 years old, when as really it was written within a very few years; could 

 the antiquary from the hand alone soon find out the cheat ? 



All the Hebrew MSS. that I have seen, are written either in Samaritan or 

 Chaldee letters. As to the Samaritan, I own they bear a good resemblance to 

 each other, and that they differ very much from those Samaritan characters 

 which we find stamped on some truly ancient and genuine coins. But then 

 there seems to be such a resemblance, as to the character, between those coins 

 struck in ages far distant from each other, that it is hard (from the considera- 

 tion of the metal, its fabric, weight, or from the shapes of the letters in the 

 inscription, &c.) to say, which coin was made in the time of David, or Solo- 

 mon, and which no older than the time of the Maccabees; this being rather to 

 be gathered from the words and meaning of their inscriptions, than from the 

 figure of the characters which compose them. The same may be said, in a 

 great measure, of the old Greek, Punic, Roman, British and other coins. 



The Chaldee character has indeed varied in tract of time, according to the 

 different fancies and humours of men. The even plain letter, I think, is the 

 most ancient. This they altered into a more neat way of making it. as in R. 

 Stephens' Hebrew Bibles. There is a third fashion, of waving the perpendicular 

 strokes like rays, as in some of the Hebrew coins exhibited in the prolegomena 

 to the Polyglot Bibles. Then 4thly, there is a large fat letter in the MS. 

 Rituals and Liturgies, besides the Rabbinical letters of Italy and Germany, with 

 their offspring, the Litterae Coronatae, and perhaps others that I never saw : 

 not to mention here the Jewish custom of writing the vulgar language of the 

 country wherein they live, with Hebrew letters. It seems a hard matter to 

 trace the original and progress of all these ways of writing, so as on the bare 

 sight of a MS. written in the Hebrew language or character, to say, by the 

 shape of the letters of this book it appears to be so old: and it seems much 

 more difficult to assign the particular province or country where each Hebrew 

 book was written; as for instance, in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, England, 

 Holland, Germany, Poland, Barbary, Persia, India, in the several provinces of 

 Turkey, &c. 



The same nearly may be said of the Greek manuscripts, in which language 

 there has been a great diversity of writing, according to the different humours 

 of the scribes, the fashion then in use, or the manner of that particular pro- 



