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impugn the truth of the Bible at all ; but though, as a book, it may 
be in some respects comparatively modern, the doctrines of the Bible 
are coeval "with the origin of the human race itself, and could only have 
been made known by divine revelation. We have proved that book to 
be absolutely true in matters of history ; # and I believe we shall prove it 
to be absolutely true in matters of theology also ; but that must be done 
by different persons. If you take a circle, and all men travel in direct 
lines from its circumference, they will all converge in a common centre. 
That centre in this case is orthodoxy — any divergence from it is only ap- 
parent, not real. (Cheers.) 
Dr. Wain weight. — It has been shown by Professor Donald that in 
the time of Moses Hebrew was already a language, and had attained a 
certain stage of consolidation ; as is shown by the fossilized character of 
certain of its elements. There are interesting indications of the extreme 
antiquity of the language, which show that in the time of Moses it had 
such an antiquity as to possess other previous stages corresponding to the 
earlier stages of our own language in the time of Chaucer. 
Mr. Cooper. — That is a matter of text, and the oldest copy of the Hebrew 
Bible in England dates from about the eighth century ; my authority is 
Professor Lenormant — indeed, we have no copy of any writing in Greek, 
Latin, or Hebrew so old as the time of our Lord, but we have Egyptian 
inscriptions that can be traced up certainly to 2,000 or 3,000 years 
before Christ. I do not now allude to incised inscriptions.f It is a 
curious fact that, as far as written testimony goes, we have none earlier than 
the Christian era, except the Egyptian papyri and the Assyrian magical 
for assuming that the language had not an archaic character of its own, or 
that Moses wrote in the ideographic Egyptian. The Moabite stone, 
900 b.c., recently discovered ( see p. 125), is written in pure Hebrew, but in 
the ancient Phoenician character ; in which character, most probably, the 
Pentateuch itself was written — (J. H. T.) 'Dr. Espin remarks ( Speakers ’ 
Commentary, vol. ii. p. 11), — “Archaisms, found in the writings of Moses, 
are not found in the book of Joshua, and there are traces in the latter 
that the language had somewhat developed itself in the interval/’ — [Ed.] 
* There are some remarkable instances of this given in the Transactions of 
the “Palestine Exploration Fund” for 1872, which are now added to the 
Institute’s Library. [Ed.] 
t Shice this discussion, Mr. Ganneau has mentioned, as regards ancient 
Hebrew inscriptions, that “ up to this time the texts found in Palestine and 
Jerusalem are few in number and of small importance : amongst them are 
two Hebrew texts in Phoenician character discovered at Siloam. Two Hebrew 
cachets in Phoenician characters give the Biblical names of Ananias, Azarias, 
and Achbor. These four texts belong to the time of the kings of J udah ; also 
several inscriptions in square Hebrew.” To these I may add the seal of 
Haggai (520 b.c.), the authenticity of which is, however, not yet admitted ly 
all, and the Moabite stone. A curious remark is made by Josephus, Antiq ., 
xii. ii. 1 ; it is that Demetrius Phalerius, library-keeper to Ptolemy Phila- 
delphus (277 b.c.), spoke of the Hebrew as. “ similar in sound and character 
to the language proper to the Syrians.” — [Ed.] 
