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E. WALTER MAUNDER^ ESQ., F.R.A.S., ON 



And this principle of emendation was reinforced by the fact that 

 some books of the Old Testament presented readings which, as times 

 "changed, began to endanger monotheism. An illustration will make 

 the matter clear. A Christian will use the expressions our Lord, 

 our Master, Jesus, Christ, Jesus Christ, without any appreciable 

 difference of meaning in nine cases out of ten. Occasionally there 

 will be passages where metre or some consideration of euphony or 

 sense will dictate the choice of one of these expressions to the exclu- 

 sion of the others, but in the great bulk of the occurrences they are 

 practically interchangeable. But suppose that Christianity were in 

 contact with some heathen religion in which the word master was 

 applied to some totally different god, and suppose further that its 

 use of Christ could lead to dangerous misunderstandings which 

 might threaten the faith of the ignorant. It might then become 

 necessary to revise documents in which any such appellation occurred 

 by substituting one or other of the alternative expressions. 



This has happened in all the older books of the Hebrew Bible. 

 The offending word was Baal — which only means lord, master, 

 owner- — and is to this day freely used among Jews in certain connec- 

 tions. In the days of Moses, and for long after, it was applied 

 without objection alike to Israel's God and to other Semitic deities. 

 But a time came when a change set in, because the Hebrew faith 

 was menaced by the worship of other Semitic baals, for instance, 

 by the belief in the Phoenician baal in the days of Ahab. Objection 

 was taken to the word on the ground of certain remarks of the 

 prophets. Later, passages like Hos. ii, 16 f. were treated as canons 

 of emendation, and changes were consequently made in the texts. 

 It has long been recognised that bad words, such as hosheth, shame, 

 had been substituted for Baal, as is shown by the comparison of 

 our extant materials. Where, for instance, a man is called Ishbosheth 

 (man of shame) in one passage, and Ishbaal (man of Baal) in a parallel 

 passage or an ancient version, there can be no doubt as to what has 

 happened. The new element consists in recognising that not merely 

 bad words like shame, but good words like God, Lord, &c., have 

 frequently replaced an original Baal. This editorial principle is 

 responsible for phenomena in Genesis which Astruc sought to 

 explain by the hypothesis of a combination of different documents. 

 For instance, the original name of Jacob's eldest son was Eeubel 

 (seen of Bel or Baal), and the explanation of that name will have 



