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flying serpents. He was deprived of the elasticity of the fly- 
ing serpent^ and degraded to the class of serpents of the dust. 
By this judgment his food became soiled with dust instead of 
the pure condition in which the springing serpents have theirs. 
There is thus nothing whatever unnatural in the Mosaic 
narrative. 
Another example of the inaccuracy of commentators is in 
the statement about the window in Gen. vi. 16. “ A window 
shalt thou make in the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it 
above.” 
It is very remarkable how long an error remains uncorrected. 
The Yulgate stands alone amongst all the ancient versions in 
rendering the word nnk ( tzdhar ), a window. 
The LXX. renders the word as an active participle — 
briauvayuv — jointing; but the grammar of the passage requires 
a noun, and not a verb. 
The Chaldee Targum, the Syriac, Samaritan, and Arabic 
versions, use words which signify shining, but none of them 
give the same word that is used for the window which Noah 
opened to let out the raven and the dove. 
The word occurs twenty-five times, and is everywhere else 
rendered noon, noon-day, or their equivalents. 
Yet with all this weight of testimony, the modern versions 
follow the incorrect rendering of the Yulgate. Even so 
eminent a critic as Gesenius has fallen into two or three errors 
in his short article upon this word. He gives : — 
ini? lumen. Gen. vi. 16. rnro inis lumen facias arose, h. e. fenestras, 
Gr. (p&Ttg (cf. viii. 6). More collectiyorum cnm fem. constr., unde 
niter? usque ad ulnae longitudinem facias eas (fenestras). 
Here Gesenius acknowledges the word to mean light. The 
noun is singular and masculine, and yet he grammatically 
deals with it as if it were feminine plural. He was compelled 
to do so by his false view of the meaning of “ in a cubit shalt 
thou finish it above,” because the pronoun is feminine. Had 
he taken the feminine noun ark as the antecedent, all would 
have been clear. f f In a cubit shalt thou finish the ark above; ” 
i.e. thou shalt give a rise of one cubit to the central line of the 
roof, so as to cause the water to run off. 
Gesenius falls into another mistake in referring to Gen, 
viii. 6 as proving that the word tzohar means a window, for 
in that place tzohar is not used, but challon, the ordinary word 
for window. The Greek word there is not but Supic* 
He also errs in giving which means men, instead of 
< ptora . 
It is thus that an error once introduced, often continues for 
