ALLUSIONS IN SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST. 



229 



I might call "travellers' tales'"? i.e., true tales of " Hyperborean 

 regions up North, where the days and nights are all wrong and 

 where the climate is (now) bearable only for two months in the year. 

 How could such a land have been created 1 Perhaps the good God 

 made it good, made it the best of all lands, but the Enemy spoiled it 

 with his cruel winter ! In a word, it is possible to agree to your 

 first deduction on p. 189, without agreeing to the second. 



(2) (On p. 188, Note, would it not be better to say Aramaic instead 

 of Hebrew (or Aramaic and Hebrew) % And it would be better to 

 translate it " spring-rain " rather than " rain." It is the March- 

 April rain, while the More or Yore is the Oct.-Dec. rain. Surely it is 

 most improbable that the Pahlavi-writing should have taken a Hebrew 

 word. All other words in Hushvaresh (Pahlavi-writing, where you 

 write Malkan-Malka and pronounce Shahdn-i-Shahd, or something like 

 it) are in Aramaic, the French of the Euphrates Valley.) 



(3) pp. 198, 199. I quite agree with you that if you read 4 Ezra 

 vii carefully, you see that the " Christ" there spoken of is not our 

 Lord, whether orthodox or modernist. But as a matter of fact this 

 4 Ezra vii, 28 is one of the few verses of the book quoted by Latin 

 Fathers. St. Ambrose (in his commentary on Luke) expressly quotes 

 it, with the name Jesus. Therefore I cannot agree with your second 

 paragraph, p. 199.* 



(4) pp. 214 If. With almost every word of what you say about 

 Slavonic Enoch I am in full agreement, and I think you have done 

 a great service by showing from a quite independent standpoint the 

 lateness of the book, not only in details, but in design and as a 

 composition. 



But why do you still believe it to have been written by a Jew 

 or at Alexandria 1 I have given in my Schweich Lectures reasons 

 for thinking that it was likely enough to have had a Christian author. 

 This author was (as you say) chiefly interested in his own pseudo- 

 astronomy : he puts it all into Enoch's mouth, because it is teaching 

 for all men, apart from "revealed religion" or " covenant religion." 

 Enoch was pre-Christian, but he was also pre-Jewish. And the 

 Hebrew words he uses, like Ararat, i.e. 'Aravoth, are, like the Bible- 

 words in heathen magical papyri, mere hocus pocus and abracadabra, 

 not like terms used by a scholar who knows Hebrew. 



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