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THE REV. CHANCELLOR J. J. LIAS, M.A., ON 



consist almost wholly of names, — we find tliree unusual 

 expressions which are not found in " P." The first is found in 

 the Psalms, the Proverbs, and in Isaiah xvi, 32 ; and though 

 the ivord occurs in " P " and in the earlier Hebrew, it is used in 

 a different sense. The other two are only found in the post- 

 exilic books. All three words and expressions relate to quite 

 ordinary ideas, but the words for expressing them have become 

 different in the post-exilic period. One is the " hand " or " good 

 hand " of God. All these expressions might obviously have 

 occurred in "P," but they never do. Verses 12-26 are a copy 

 of a letter of Artaxerxes in Aramaic. 



Chapter viii. — One word in this chapter does occur in " P " 

 and the later Hebrew, but it also appears in what the critics 

 call the " Book of the Covenant " (Exodus xx-xxiii), which the 

 more moderate critics (they are by no means all agreed) assign 

 to the Mosaic period ; so it cannot be used to prove that " P " 

 is not of Mosaic origin. Another word which occurs frequently 

 in " P " and in the later Hebrew occurs also in Deuteronomy, 

 which the critics consider to have been written some three 

 centuries before " P." Thirteen other expressions, some of them 

 very peculiar post-exilic idioms, or clearly post-exilic words, are 

 found in this chapter ; " P " never uses them.* 



Chapter ix. — Here occurs the only other instance (see 

 chapter i, 1) of an expression which is confined to " P " and the 

 post-exilic writers. It may be dismissed as purely acccidental. 

 Fer contra, many and most remarkable instances of peculiar 

 words and expressions of the post-exilic period, including the 

 use, or rather misuse, of prepositions, occur in this chapter. I 

 am sorry that the limits to which I am confined do not permit 

 me to particularize them. They are most significant. Some of 

 them may be due to a corrupt text, though they are far more 

 likely to be due to the mistakes of men who had learned to 

 speak the kindred Babylonian language or the Aramaic dialect.f 

 One of them is admitted by Dr. Driver to be " a distinctively 

 late idiom," and " common in post-Biblical Hebrew." Again he 

 neglects to tell us that it never occurs in " P." Several of 

 these passages, — and there are a good many elsewhere, — have 



* One of them appears in some copies of Moses' Song (Deuteronomy 

 xxxii, 2), but there is another reading. One relating to governors of 

 subordinate rank appears in i and ii Kings, in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezra, 

 Neheniiah, Esther, Haggai and Malachi, but never in " P." 



t I have treated them at length in my paper on this subject in the 

 Bibliotheca Sacra for April, 1910. 



