62 
Professor Merx gives an account of the gradual progress 
inade in the interpretation of the story. What he calls the ,exe- 
getic conscience*, could not accept the combination of bees 
with rottenness. From the old Syriac translator down to the 
learned and orthodox Jesuit interpreters of the XVIIth century, 
attempts were made to smooth over the difficulty. These attempts 
were of the weakest kind. A Hebrew word which undoubtedly 
means a corpse, they proposed to translate as ,skeleton*; or 
they made a sophistical distinction between urban bees, fasti- 
dious and dainty, and wild bees, indifferent to bad smells. It 
is in our times only that a distinguished theologian, Studer in 
Berne, struck in the right direction in pointing out that the 
solution of the difficulty is to be looked for in Samson’s riddle; 
a riddle presupposes the possibility of guessing it; it must be 
based upon some creed, or superstition, or notion of a kind 
understood and accepted by both parties; the problem con- 
sisted therefore in the discovery of this sawbstratwn, or key, to 
the riddle. This was found in the recognition of the fact that 
Samson’s bee was in reality a carcase-born fly, looking very 
much like a bee, and which had given occasion to the super- 
stition about carcase-born bees. Such is the substance of Pro- 
fesssor Merx’s able and learned article. 
VIIL. 
The Honey in the Carcase of the Lion. 
By A. Merx (1). 
Since friend Siegfried (2) has let out the secret that con- 
scientious expounders of the scriptures are driven to despair by 
the milk-and-honey-question in Isaiah, Chapt. 7—9, without his 
(1) This is a translation ot Prof. Merx’s article in German, which appeared 
in the ,Protestantische Kirchenzeitung* 1887, p. 17. Compare my remarks about 
it at the end of the preceding Supplement. A. Merx is Professor of Scriptural 
Kxegesis in Heidelberg. 
(2) Siegfried is Professor of Theology in Jena. 
