212 EEV. J. IVERACH MUNRO, M.A.^ ON THK WITNESS OF 



significance. In this passage we can only do so with the name 

 Cain by emphasizing it. Then if we take 'eth-JeJwvali as a case 

 of the extremely common constructio 'praegnans, as I think we 

 should, we have the translation, " even the promise of Jehovah, 

 that is the seed of the woman who was to brnise the serpent's 

 head." The full passage would be then : " And she bare Cain 

 {gotten) and said I have gotten a man, even the promise of 

 Jehovah," which thoroughly agrees with the context. 



Having illustrated in a very imperfect way these phenomena 

 of the old verbal system, I may point out that we have two 

 instances of perfects in o representing the old active vowel in 

 spite of the doubling of the second consonant, one in Genesis 

 xlix, 23,^3.11, wa-ro^^Z^il, "and they kept shooting," and Job xxiv, 



24, ^OT, Tommu, " they raised " (Davidson's Hebrew Grammar, 

 10th to 18th Editions, p. 106). These mark a very ancient stage 

 of the language, when even the doubling of the last consonant 

 had only modified the ait to o. 



This word rommH, in Job, contains an excellent 



illustration of what was included under the old active — action 

 proceeding from the agent himself, which here seems to have a 

 reflexive meaning, not "to be exalted" but " exalt themselves": 

 compare y^)*), rauts, " to run," active, but not grammatically 



transitive. Indeed, Kenan turns out to be right after all in 

 regard to the early date of the book of Job. The language in 

 that book bears marks of the most ancient forms we have in 

 Hebrew. The evidential as well as philological value of these 

 can hardly be over-estimated. There may be a perfect mine in 

 a single word. Take, for example, the word for God which 



occurs so often in Job, PTi^i^, 'Eloah. This is a word whose 



derivation has been a standing puzzle to philologists. That 

 it has been so, arises from the fact that the book of Job has 

 preserved for us a form of derivation which had become 



obsolete. Every derivative elsewhere with the name, ^JEl 



in the first part, has El either prefixed without a connecting 



vowel as "T*l^t;^, 'Elddd, or the connecting vowel is i, Txh^,, 



'Eliddd. Now 'Eloah goes back to an older stage of language 



^ — the stage when S't^^^Q, Fenuel, was the recognized form for 



combining parts of names, where, as we have already seen, u 

 is the vowel of the old nominative ending. Hence we have 



in 'Eloah, an old nominative form of combination, 6 being 



