having been made singularly harmonious ; owing to sorupulous care on the part of the
apostles to cite each passage according to its Greek coloring in the Septuagint ; for a long
time held in c om m o n to b e c a n o n ic a l as w e l l by J e w s as by Greeks.
Bewildered for a time by these dexterous sophisms, and mystified through literary ambuscades
which it required a Grecian intelleot to comprehend, the worthy old Rabbis (taken
in reverse) had no resource but to proscribe the Septuagint, and ostracize its readers,
a The iaw in Greek ! Darkness ! Three days fa st! ” (170) Because, says tlie Talmud, “ on
that day, in the time of King Ptolemy, the Law was written in Greek, and darkness came
upon the earth for three days.” (171) Little by little, however, their perceptive .faculties
expanded to the true posture of affairs ; and by proving incontinently that many things,
which looked one way in the Greek, .looked quite another in the Hebrew, the Rabbis soon
defeated their assailants ; routing them so repeatedly, that gradually the latter thought it
safer to let such doughty controversialists alone: a method of repulsion continued with
never-failing success by Israel’s wide-spread posterity even now ; who, when summoned by
anxious “ Missionaries for the Conversion of the Jews to adopt a Trinitarian faith which
Semitic monotheism (172) despises, have merely to show such well-meaning perçons that
king James’s version does really copy the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew, to see, these
itinerant simplicities pocket their English Bibles and slink off. Some day, perhaps, w en
the rules of archaeology through popular diffusion have augmented, all over Anglo-
Saxondom, that mental element termed “ common sense,” sundry excellent persons, in the
language of Letronne,, “ sentiront, je pense, l’inutilité, la vanité de leurs efforts.” (173)
The above conclusions on the Septuagint, long known to scholars, if not previously ei-
pressed in print with the same “ brutale franchise” habitual to writers who believe they
speak the truth (so far as ratiocination can deduce logical results from known premises,-
humanum est errare), have enfeebled its value-except for purposes' of archæological restorations
of the Hebrew text — to such degree that, in this discjission, the ablest theologian!
have advanced into the positions stage of philosophy. No scientific exegetist of the present
generation—save for purposes aforesaid-perils his Continental reputation on the letter of,
any Greek version, unless chronological computations be the objects of his research. Another
Essay (III.) of this book gives parallel tables wherein the Septuagint system is compared
with others • but, to evince the numerical discrepancies between Text and versions, it suffices
here to note, that, from the creation of Adam to the “ Delfige,” computations (based
upon the Hebrew original, as now extant) generally yield 1656 ; upon the Samaritan Pen-
tateuch, 1307 ; and upon the Septuagint, 2242 years. ,
The indefatigable labors of a profound Hellenist and Egyptological scholar, enable us to
sweep away any chronological superstitions, yet in fashionable vogue, built upon the Sep
tuagint : — .
(170)B u n s e n : Op.cit.; p . 185. I ,
n 711 D e W e t t e • Note, v. 150; — H e n n e l l : Origin o f Christianity > PP-|| 45 4 > 4 5 5 > n o t e * , “ h i « God t one. He is « * M eternal. He never has begotten, and was never begof
^ m ^ ^ Z l ^ ' l n s c r i p t i a m ; Paris, 1843; Introd, i. p. xliii. We clip the following ftom the London^
auirer, 1853: “ The Cost of Converting a Jew.—After some twenty years of labor — after the ereotion o _
on Mount Zion, at an enormous cost-a fter the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of pounds, the
Society for promoting Christianity among the Jews ’ (a mission presided over by a bishop and endowed J
joint efforts of the kingdoms of Prussia and England) produces as its fruits, according to ts own
congregation of just Mrtysmm Jewish converts. During the whole of last year, the result of la
A v e r s i o n of one Jew. The cost of this one convert was the animal outlay at Jerusalem alone,
bishop’s stipend, of £1228 expended on the mission, £445 on the church, £1173 on the hospital, and £4 (
B l i l : H i ; see Report, p. I ll) on the house of industry. The Jerusalem Mission, then, if «
add to its cost the £1200 per annum paid to.Bishop Gobat, arising from the endowment, has actually,
past year, baptized converts at the moderate rate of only £4443 7s. 2d. per head.
the residence of the Jews in Egypt by 275 years, allowing to it only the more probable
space of 155 years. But having thus made the great Jewish epoch, the migration of Abraham
out of Chaldsea, 315 years more modern, they thought it equally necessary to make
such a large addition to the age of the world as; the history of science and'civilization, and
the state of Egypt at the time of Abraham, seemed to call for. Accordingly, they added
to. the genealogies of the patriarchs neither more nor less than a whole Egyptian cycle
[Sothicperiod] (174) of 1460 years; or 580 between Adam and Noah, and 880 between
Noah and Abraham, though in so doing they carelessly made Methuselah outlive the
Flood. (175)
This plain matter-of-fact solution of the reasons why the Septuagint chronology differs
from that of the Hebrew— between Adam and the Deluge — upon popular computations
only 58 6 years! relieves us from the bootless trouble of attaching any importance to
opinions current at Alexandria among those successors of the Founder of chronology; who,
with the original copies of M a n e t h o ( 1 7 6 ) before them, paid homage to his accuracy in
their endeavors to assimilate their own foreign estimates of time to his.
Archseological rules also permit two deductions to be drawn from these premises:__
1st. That the differences of numerical results among eariy Christian and Judaical com-
putators of the Septuagint proceed less from wilful perversions of numbers (as heretofore
attributed to Josephus and others), than from radical discrepancies then existing
between the manuscript consulted by one computator, and those exemplars whose
numeration was followed by his compeers. This .becomes obvious by comparing the
eras severally reached by modern computations upon manuscript and printed copies
now extant.
i . Creation b. p. Deluges: a
Hales’s Septuagint computation—edition to us unknown— 5586 3246
Alexandrinus MS. 5508 —
Vaticanus MS. . . .' . . ^ * 5270
I Josephus, on some lost MS.—probably . . .• . 5555 ■ 3146
I 2d. That already in the time of Josephus, during the first century after Christ, the
manuscript he followed must have differed in numeration from the parental exemplars
, of those transcriptions that, under the modem names of various codices, Cottonianus,
Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, Besce, &c. (none earlier than a. d . 500), have reached our
day; and ergo there must have been many corruptions and variants among Septuagint
MSS., about and prior to the Christian era.
I Hence we conclude, that it is as vain a task for computators, now-a-days, to recover more
ffthan a vague approximation of chronological notions (deducible from the Septuagint) current
^Alexandria before the Christian era, as, after the foregoing analysis of the natural origin,
¡history, and manifold corruptions of Greek codices, it would be to insist upon Divine
authenticity for king James’s version ; on the plea that, in the majority of cases, its forty-
seven translators rendered from the Greek of editions, or manuscripts, so rotten in basis as
{those of 'the Septuagint.
I We proceed to the Hebrew Text; with the remark that, although we now know that it
fould have had little to do with the formation of our “ authorized version,” we shall
it under the hypothesis (customarily put forward) that it had a great deal.
| In the year 1603,,at the time when king James authorized a new English translation,
L C7 numerous Printeii editions of the Hebrew Text familiar to'biblical scholars,
r hat of Soncino, 1488, the first printed;, of,Brescia, 1494, used by Luther for his transla-
I f ^ e r g ’s,'1516-45; Stephens’*, 1544-46; Munster’s, 1546; are the most promi-
P of the number. Whether the translators consulted any, or what, Hebrew manuscripts,
I not appear from works within our present reach. We have shown how trivial was their
|, quamtance with the language of the editions, and may be persuaded that they did not
K ' i S S S t ÿ ÿ * Hgypte Ancienne; 1840;pp. 236-240;-Gimaou: Chapters™ Early Egyptian Bis-
I I S o ’ P1 ’ ’ 6 ’ 61;~ LISTOS: Chronologie; 1849; t. pp. 165-180.
Seakpb: Op. cit.; p. 196.
[ I176) Buxsw: Op. cit. ; pp. 56-96.