PHILOLOGY TO THE TRUTH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 215 



completely that the words in which it was expressed became 

 the accepted name of God. The plural form into which it 

 developed is a standing evidence of fact that man has fallen, 

 and ever tends to fall, but for the grace of God, irom a purer 

 to a lower conception of Him. 



Then another element philology teaches us, apart from senti- 

 ment, namely, that language must be prepared to receive and 

 conserve the Eevelation, and not until the vast conception of 

 Being " as the source of all being and action had been con- 

 ceived and expressed in human speech, could the later develop- 

 ment of the knowledge of His manifold working, as we have it 

 from Exodus to the end of Deuteronomy, be given. The sounds 

 of the letters of Jehovah and Jah were ancient with an ancient 

 meaning, the new meaning which had in the interval been 

 developed was the meaning in the verb H^H, " to be." This 



gives light to Exodus iii, 14 ; vi, 3. 



Jehovah Himself takes the new meaning to express Himself ; 

 with tliat Eevelation, and taking up all that lay in Genesis, He 

 proceeds to reveal Himself in all that is recorded from Exodus 

 to the end of Deuteronomy. 



Philology now, by its confirmation of the truth of the Eecord, 

 bids us interpret the further Eevelation throughout the history 

 of Israel and Judah. The evidence of philology confirms the 

 truth of the narrative, and therefore the reality of the Eevela- 

 tion. The Book of the Law of Jehovah ruled the language, as 

 it ought to have ruled the conduct, of the Chosen People right 

 on to Malachi. Wherever the Hebrew language as distinct 

 from Aramaic is used, the Pentateuch governs the whole, yet in 

 such a way that one could not possibly put the Hebrew of, say, 

 Ezekiel, Daniel, Ezra, the Chronicles, or Nehemiah into the 

 Pentateuch without showing an incongruency which would at 

 once be detected. What is said of the Pentateuch can with 

 equal truth be said of, for example, Isaiah. Philology says of 

 the supposition that the numerous Isaiahs, by theory scattered 

 up and down the book of Isaiah, spoke in the Exile, is a sheer 

 impossibility. They could not possibly have avoided the 

 peculiarities of the language they and their contemporaries 

 spoke. Their genius, supposing them to have existed then, 

 would certainly have found expression, yet as certainly, not by 

 using with a pathos and passion that even yet carry us away, 

 the language so like that of a man who lived a hundred and 

 twenty years before, hundreds of miles distant, and under vastly 

 different conditions, so like that even those who were familiar 



