218 REV. J. IVERACH MUNEO, ON THE WITNESS OF 



our Lord, and is based upon Psalm Ixxxii. In verses 6 and 7 we 

 read : "I have said ye are Elohim, and all of you are sons of JElyon : 

 but as Adam ye shall die, and as one of the Sarim ye shall fall." 

 Our Lord quotes the first part of this verse in John x. Some years 

 ago I listened to a lecture by a Unitarian scholar from Oxford, on 

 the Epistle to the Ephesians, and I asked him afterwards whether 

 we were to understand that he intended that our Lord never claimed 

 to be Divine. He said "Yes, certainly." I said, " Surely in John x 

 He makes that claim," and I referred him to verses 34-36. Of 

 course Greek was not the language usually spoken by our Lord, 

 but Aramaic or " Hebrew " : for " gods " we must therefore read 

 " Elohim." Our Lord's argument is briefly this : " If He called 

 them Elohim unto whom the word of Elohim came, do you mean to 

 say that I blaspheme, I who am indeed the Son of Elohim, and thus 

 so much above those who were merely persons unto whom the word 

 of Elohim came 1 " Here then our Lord not only rebuts the 

 accusation of blasphemy, but gives us also the only definition of the 

 word " Elohim " that I know anywhere, and I think it is a satis- 

 factory definition. They were persons " unto whom the word of 

 the Lord came." Who they were as personalities in antediluvian 

 times may still be a mystery, but in later times they were "judges." 



I offer these remarks as bearing upon one point of the paper 

 only, which is now open for discussion. I must ask every speaker 

 to be as brief as possible. 



Mr. M. L. Rouse, B.A., B.L. : — The writer of the paper refers 

 several times to the Semitic Indo-European Speech. The Bible — to 

 take the Bible evidence first — after enumerating each family of Noah 

 — Shem, Ham, and Japheth — distinctly says : These were their 

 descendants "by their families, by their languages " ; and in the case 

 of the sons of Japheth it says: "By these were the isles of the 

 Gentiles divided in their lands," In a paper which I had the honour 

 to read here some twelve years ago, I showed that Hebrew was the 

 first language of all. Why should the Indo-European;be singled out ? 

 The languages were never all one, according to our investigations. 



The lecturer's attempt to show a genitive in the Hebrew of 

 (rftnesis is certainly a failure ; for the i of Peniel belongs, not to the 

 governed but to the governing word : it is not paneh^ face, Eli, of 

 God, but panlm, a plural word reduced to its construct form jpeni, 



