added to the (Hebrew) Text by twice mentioning the gates of the city, first to make David
play upon his harp, and afterwards to cause him to fall against the said gates. There is
perhaps no passage in Scripture that has been more completely denaturalized through the
obscurity of a single word. It is evident that David had altogether a part more dignified,
more reasonable, to adopt than to counterfeit a lunatic; and moreover that Achish did not
display great esteem for his court by saying that madmen were not wanting in it. But the
famous TaU, misunderstood, has thrown all interpreters into error. So we will give to it
its veritable sense of to bless § to this we add that Sh^ar [in Hebrew, as in vulgar Arabic
now] does not signify ‘ door ’ in this passage, but poetry, as' its Arabic root teaches:
d a le th has the value of ‘door’ in the same sense that Chaldees and Arabs call ‘ doors’
[bdb, bib&n] or ‘houses’ \blyt, beyodt] the strophes; that is, those commencements of chapters
and of strophes that we [Italians] call ‘stanze’ [and that in English is adopted for poetry in
our word stanzas; a word that in Italian, like the above nouns in Oriental speech, has the
double meaning of ‘ stanza’ and ‘ chamber’]; If it be insisted that David was raving,
it will be, then, with poetic furor— the prophetic transport that animated him : but the
Arabic root shagi#, which signifies to exhibit valor, bravery, courage, accords much better
with the context. These few rays of light ought to be sufficient to dissipate the thick tene-
brosities which Translators have piled upon this divine narrative. We may thenceforward
give to these verses a reasonable translation and worthy of the majesty of Scripture: —
‘ David arose, and fleeing on that day from the presence of Saul, came to Achish the king
of Gath.—Then the servants of Achish said to him, ‘And is not this David king of the
earth ? is it not in his honor th a t it was sung in chorus [not, at ancient Fandangos ! ] ; Saul
has killed a thousand, and David ten thousand! ’ — David weighing these words in his
heart, feared greatly in presence of Achish king of Gath.—It was for this that in his presence,
he [David] celebrated their power in a varied hymn and in inspired verses; and, at
each commencement of a strophe he made TaTJ [i. e., he made ‘ benedictions ’ -—he blessed
them\ ; and already the sweat was dripping upon the chin’s honor [i.i e., upon his beard, in
Oriental phraseology] when Achish interrupted him, and said to his servant: ‘ hearken to
this man who affects inspiration [literally, I comes- the inspired ’] ; are poets [bards,^ improvisator^
wanting to me, that you must bring this one to celebrate my power ? and shall
(such as) he come into my house ? ’ Nevertheless, David escaped, and took the road that
conducted to the cavern of Adulla.” (73)
Who seem most “ cracked,” David, or the bibliolaters of king James’s version?
E . — Leviticus xi. 20.
“ All fowls that creep, going upon aU four, shall be an abomination to you.”
To us, likewise! “ Rarse aves,” invaluable however to museums of Natural History. Not
merely, were this prohibition authentic, did fo'ur-legged-fowls exist in the days of Moses,
but the inhibition to eat them would now be worthless to a Caraite Jew, because the breed
is extinct. Gahen renders — “ Every winged-insect [or literally, flying-creeping thing]
that walks upon four [claws, feet, understood] is an abomination unto you.” ' .
Dwelling not upon verse 21, although marvelling h ow l e g s ” could be placed anatomically
elsewhere than “ above their feet,” we refreshen ourselves with
F . — 2 Kings, vi. 25..
“ And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it, until an ass’s head was sold
a - for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove’s dung for five pieces of silver.”
•' “ Stemhold and Hopkins had great qualms
When they translated David’s psalms ” ;
but the sufferings of these poor men were infinitesimally small compared to those the forty-
seven would h a v e experienced had they partaken of that delicate repast, for about two-
thirds of a pint of which the starving Samaritans paid such monstrous prices! Pigeon's dung,
or “ doves’-dung,” owing to the quantity of ammonia it contains, is still used throughout
(73) -Op. cit.; Ch. ix. § 3. Cahen: vii. p. 86, preserves the old mistakes.
the East, in the absence of modern chemistry, to give temper to Damascene sword-blades,
&c. It sharpens weapons, not appetites ! Can one conceive a human stomach, however
depraved by want, alimented upon “ guano?” Boehart,(74) two centuries, ago, showed
that “ pois chicheSj” in Italian ceci, in English “ ehick*pea,” -—the commonest Oriental
vetch, or pea, -r- is the rational interpretation of the word; and thus the only enigma preserved
is, how forty-seven Englishmen could have committed a mistake so extraordinary.
The obsolete word “ cab” aptly illustrates how imperative it has become, through unavoidable
changes o f language within 250 years, to issue a re-translation in our current
vernacular, lest the illiterate should think that “ ca6-riolets,” 26 centuries ago, plied in the
streets of Samaria! Superstition is gradually elevating the vulgar Cockney speech of the
age of King James into our “ lingua sancta; ” and the translation authorized in his reign
will .some day become unintelligible and useless in the “ Far West,” except to those who
possess glossaries wherewith to read it. Theologers would act wisely to consider these
things, while we pass on to
G. —Leviticus xxi. 18 and 17.
“ He that hath a flat nose ” —[is forbidden] — u approach to offer the bread of his God.”
A flat nose, in the Abrahamic type of mankind, among their “ Cohenlm” or priesthood,
was, in the days of the Hebrew Lawgiver, as it is now among Israel’s far-scattered descendants,
too great a deviation of physical lineaments from the indelible standard of the race
(portrayed as we exhibit them in our present work from the monuments of that epoch, and
as we daily see them in our streets) not to excite suspicion that such cases testified to admixtures
of foreign(75) and consequently of “ impure blood” ; and therefore to debar a
priest with a “ flat nose” from the Tabernacle was rational at their point of view. Negro
families [as already demonstrated, supra,'] are unmentioned throughout the Hebrew Text;
and negrophilism may accordingly rejoice that the rendering selected by the forty-seven
cannot now be applied to the former “ de jure,” where it is notoriously (in the Free States
of this Federation, especially) “ de facto.”
Happily — no thanks to our translators— “ Snubs” of universal humanity may legally
officiate at sanctuaries; the word.KARM (76) meaning only a ‘‘mutilated nose:’’ and the
inhibition referring to noses injured by deformity, accident, disease, or law, (77) our apprehensions
were futile, like their translation.
An ethnological item has been touched upon involuntarily, and now we may as well give
ventilation to another much-abused text.
H . — Song of Solomon, i. 5, 6.
, “ I am, black, but comely,, . . Look not upon me because I amblack, because the sun hath looked upon
me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me keeper of the vineyards; but mine
own vineyard have I not kept.”
The apocryphal “ prologue” at the head of this chapter tells us that here the Church
“ confesseth her deformity” ! It were well if, before printing this acknowledgment (which
it is not for us to dispute), the “ Establishment ” had corrected the deformity of their tram-
lation : which has led our anglicized Nigritians to claim this supposititious bride of Solomon
as a Venus of their own species! With equal reason, some commentators,)«Ten of modern
(74) Salverte; Sciences Occultes ; i. p. 44. Cahen (whose notes are infinitely more valuable than his textual
translations), viii. p. 127, note, adds —“ Selon plusieurs commentateurs, il s’agit ici d’une nourriture misé-
rable, de quelque h'erbe à vil prix,” &c.
(75) On returning from the Captivity, “ the children of Habaiah, the children of Koz, the children of Bar-
zillai, which took me [sio, in our version 1] of the daughters of Barzillai the Sileadite to 'Wife, and was [/ idem]
called after their name,” were, “ as polluted, put from the priesthood”— (Nehemiah vii. 63, 64.)
(76) Ca h e n : vol. ill. pp. 99, 100.
(77) “ I cut off both his nose and ears,” proclaims Damps, of Phraortes, and of Sitratachmes, at Behistun.
( awunson: Persian Cuneif. Inscrip.; 1846; part i. p. 34.) Philanthropy need not shudder at atrocities of the
century b . c., for in Turkey such punishment is as common now as it was 3300 years ago, if Moses
wrote this passage. r