THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 41 
equipment of the High Priest. We have no definite knowledge 
of the nature of the materials of which they were made, nor 
even of the meaning of the names. Urim and Thummin haye 
been generally interpreted as Light and Perfection, but the 
accuracy of this rendering is more than doubtful. It has been 
suggested that the former of the two names is derived from the 
Hebrew root arar, “to curse” and the latter from another root 
signifying, “to be without fault.” 
The period of captivity in Babylon from about 606 to 534 
B.C., resulted in a certain amount of corruption of the lan- 
guage of the Jewish people, so that on their return to Palestine 
the vernacular was a mixture of Hebrew and Caldee, and the 
old pure Hebrew was no longer understood—(Nehemiah 8, 6- 
8), “and Ezra . . . . also Jeshua, and Bani . . . ., caused 
the people to understand the law. . . . . So they read in the 
book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and 
caused them to understand the reading.” 
Owing to this a good deal of dificulty exists in the inter- 
pretation of many little-used words, and particularly, technical 
terms such as the names of gems. 
It was not until somewhere between 270 and 280 B.C. that 
the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament mto Greek 
was carried out, and in this the above list of stones in the 
breastplate is given, with the difference that chrusolithos is 
substituted for adamas. That is sapphire for diamond. This 
shows that the Greek and Hnglish translators of the Old Testa- 
ment must have had different Hebrew words in the manuscripts 
on which they worked, or have translated the words differently. 
The translation of a Hebrew name into Greek adamas and Eng- 
lish diamond cannot be correct, for the reason that there was 
no diamond large enough to form one of the stones; and as 
we know each stone had engraved on it the name of a tribe, 
and the art of engraving on diamond was unknown to the 
Jews, and in fact was only discovered within comparatively 
recent years, some other stone must have been used. Indeed, it 
is somewhat doubtful if the ancient Jews were acquainted with 
the diamond as a gem stone. The original breastplate was 
lost during one of the earlier of the numerous disastrous 
periods when Jerusalem was captured, and the Temple plun- 
dered by various invaders; thus, by Shishak, King of Egypt, 
about 971 B.C. (1 Kings 14, 25-26), “and it came to pass in 
the fifth year of King Rehoboam, that Shishak, King of Egypt, 
came up against Jerusalem; and he took away the treasures 
os 
