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REV. J. IVERACH MUNRO^ M.A.^ ON 



natives or their successors in the cities of Samaria should have 

 received the Book from their avowed enemies the Jews ; neither can 

 we conceive it possible that they should hold as sacred a volume 

 that came into being among the Jews after the national revolt and 

 schism. Everything tends to show that their religious life radiated 

 round a book which v/as the property of ALL Israel in antecedent 

 times. So it was taken away into Assyria, and so it was received 

 back at the hands of the priests of whom we have heard this after- 

 noon. 



Mr. Rouse said : A striking evidence brought before us in this 

 full and lucid paper, that the Hebrew Pentateuch preserved by the 

 Samaritans was written before the age of all Rabbinical traditions, is 

 the fact that in the early translation which they use along with it 

 the Samaritan people have the name Jehovah every time that its 

 four consonants occur in the original. It is clear that they did not 

 obey a tradition which is as old as the Septuagint (280 B.C.), by 

 reading the title Adonai (Lord) instead of the sacred name in their 

 Hebrew text ; for, had they done so, they would in their translation 

 certainly have written Adonai itself, or a word of like import in the 

 corresponding passages, even as the Grecian Jews in their Septuagint 

 everywhere wrote Kyrios (Lord) instead of Jehovah. 



That the northern kingdom of Israel (as stated by a previous 

 speaker) reckoned tlieir year from a month other than that 

 with which the Jewish Kingdom began it, I was strongly 

 convinced some years ago when comparing the notes of 

 contemporaneity made in the Books of Kings between the two 

 royal lines ; and I found that in several cases I solved a great 

 difficulty by making the northern year begin with the eighth 

 Jewish month. 



Pastor Munro will be glad to hear that one of his audience has 

 already advanced a little way on a special research that he has 

 indicated — to prove that Hebrew in its early form was the original 

 language of mankind. The late Pastor R. Govett of Norwich 

 wrote a book entitled Enfjlish Derived from Hebrew in which a mass 

 of evidence was gathered iti favour of the view ; and having 

 perused the same, I mentioned it to the late Professor Skeat, who, 

 however, objected that the author had made his evidence inconclusive 

 by contenting himself in nearly ail cases with giving only the 

 consonants of the Hebrew w^ords. The following instances of three 



