204 



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



treatment of the question which, so far as I know, it has ever 

 received. It brings out the two important facts that the language 

 of the Samaritan Pentateuch was carefully revised, and that the 

 revision was carried on in Hezekiah's time ; as well as that the 

 Northern dialect, with which we meet in the Elijah and Elisha 

 section of the Historical Scriptures, characterizes its contents. The 

 paper brings out very clearly the bearing of these facts on its having 

 been revised under the circumstances recorded in ii Kings xvii, 

 24-41. The allusion of the writer to the "pitfalls" presented 

 by the contents of Ezra, Nehemiah or Chronicles will, I fear, escape 

 those of his readers who are unacquainted with Hebrew. I lately 

 wrote a paper in the Bihliotheca Sacra to show that neither did Ezra 

 and Nehemiah display the peculiarities attributed by recent critics 

 to the supposed post-exilic " P," nor did " P " in any single instance 

 fall into the mistakes made by Ezra and Nehemiah in their 

 undoubtedly post-exilic Hebrew, especially in their abnormal use of 

 prepositions. So serious are some of these mistakes that it is clear 

 that the revisers sometimes cannot translate the impossible Hebrew 

 of those writers. In the seventy years of the captivity the art of 

 writing Hebrew had been largely lost. 



On page 188 I note that an argument based on a fact ascertained 

 by so competent a Hebrew scholar as Gesenius, can hardly be 

 described as " a theory only, unsupported by facts." The argument, 

 again, in p. 187, is not one which the modern critic can pass over, as 

 he is so fond of doing, sub silentio. The argument based on Ezekiel's 

 unusual use of jmkad is very weighty indeed. The argument from 

 the well-known fact that the third person singular of the pronoun 

 is the same in masculine and feminine in the Pentateuch only is 

 stated more forcibly than I have ever seen it stated before. It 

 might have been added that the word for youth and maiden is the 

 same throughout the Pentateuch. The feminine termination of the 

 word appears first in the later Scriptures. In Gen. xxxiv the 

 modern critic, in sublime unconsciousness of the important fact, 

 assigns some portions of the chapter to the pre-exilic and some to 

 the post-exilic writer. The fact is that the Hebrew of the whole 

 chapter is characteristic of the Mosaic age. I am further glad to 

 find that the paper confirms a conclusion to which I have 

 independently come, expressed in a work which I have not yet 

 published, that Jah is not a mere abbreviation of Jehovah. 



