God and His Book/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
Predecessor of the Holy Ghost—The Language in which the Old Testament was Written—The Maserites—Adoption of Chaldean Alphabet—Indefinite Character of the Hebrew Text—Different Readings.
The Holy Ghost, according to the Filioque Nicene Creed, is descended from the Father and the Son; and yet the said Holy Ghost "overshadowed" Mary and begot the very Son from whom he proceeded! Reader, you are required only to believe this; you are not expected to understand it. A serious attempt to understand it would drive you mad; but, of course, madness—or, at least, mental imbecility and distortion—is the necessary preliminary to becoming a Christian. The first time we hear of the mysterious "person" who inspired the Scriptures in the New Testament is in the assurance that Mary "was found with child of the Holy Ghost." This, of course, determines the sex of the Ghost; and, up to date, that is all in regard to him that has been determined.
Instead of proceeding from the Father and the Son, the Holy Ghost would seem to be descended from בת קול Daughter of a Voice. It was this Bath-Kol or oracular voice, that did duty in inspiring the whole of the Old Testament—prompting Moses, Elijah, Daniel, and other holy men of God. It is in the New Testament that this Bath-Kol first steps upon the scene as the Holy Ghost, and he has the honour, as we have seen, of being introduced as the father of the child of an unmarried woman.
The Holy Ghost has not even all the New Testament to himself; for, in the Syriac version, the "voice from heaven"[1] is our old friend Bath-Kol. This בת קול strides through the Talmud recking nothing of his new-fangled successor, πνευμα, the Holy Ghost. Both the Bath-Kol and the Holy Ghost seem to have been ornithologically inclined, and to have had a special penchant for the pigeon. In the Talmud Rabbi Jose writes: "I went once into the ruins of Jerusalem to pray, and I heard there a Bath-Kol, cooing like a dove, and saying: 'Woe to the children on account of whose sin I have destroyed my home, have burnt my temple, and have dispersed them among the Gentiles!'" So much for the Bath-Kol that, in the fulness of time, seems to have developed into a full-blown Holy Ghost, to whom we are indebted for begetting out blessed Lord and for inspiring those who wrote an account of his life and teachings.
Before I proceed to other relevant considerations let us briefly advert to the language in which the Holy Ghost wrote the Scriptures, in the searching of which we are promised "eternal life." Dupin, who was doctor of the Sorbonne, professor of philosophy, and one of the most learned of Christian writers, observes[2]:—"The Hebrew alphabet is composed of twenty-two letters, like those of the Samaritans, Chaldeans, and Syrians. But, of these letters, none are vowels, and, in consequence, the pronunciation cannot be determined. The Hebrews have invented points, which, being put under the letters, answer the purpose of vowels. These vowel-points serve not only to fix the pronunciation, but also the signification of a word, because, many times, the word being differently pointed and pronounced alters the meaning entirely. This is the consideration which has made the question as to the antiquity of the points of so much importance, and has, consequently, had such elaborate treatment. Some have pretended that these points are as ancient as the Hebrew tongue, and that Abraham made use of them. Others make Moses the author of them. But the most common opinion among the Jews is that, Moses having learnt of God the true pronunciation of Hebrew words, this science was preserved in the synagogue by oral tradition till the time of Ezra, who invented the points and accents to fix the meaning. Ellas Levita, a German Jew of the last generation, and deeply learned in Hebrew grammar, has rejected this opinion, and contended that the invention of points took place in much more recent times. He ascribes the invention to the Jews of Tiberias and to the year 500 A.D., and alleges that the invention was not perfected till about the year 1040 A.D., by two famous Maserites, Ben-Ascher and Ben-Naphtali."
Certain scholars have, indeed, contended—evidently in the interests of "Holy Writ," rather than in deference to the weight of evidence—that the points are very ancient; but the great consensus of learned opinion inclines towards the accepting of the contention of Elias Levita. Dr. Prideaux observes[3] that "the sacred Books made use of among the Jews in their synagogues have ever been and still are without the vowel points, which could not have happened had they been placed there by Ezra, and had, consequently, been of the same authority with the letters. For, had they been so, they would certainly have been preserved in the synagogues with the same care as the rest of the text." Dr. Prideaux goes on to say that no mention is made of the points in either the Mishna or Gemara, and that "neither do we find the least hint of them in Philo-Judæus or Josephus, who are the oldest writers of the Jews, or in any of the ancient Christian writers for several hundred years after Christ. And, although among them Origen and Jerome were well skilled in the Hebrew language, yet in none of their writings do they speak the least of them. Origen flourished in the third, and Jerome in the fifth, century; and the latter, having lived a long while in Judæa, and there more especially applied himself to the study of the Hebrew learning, and much conversed with the Jewish rabbis for his improvement herein, it is not likely that he could have missed making some mention of them through all his voluminous works, if they had been either in being among the Jews in his time, or in any credit or authority with them, and that especially since, in his commentaries, there were so many necessary occasions for taking notice of them." Dr. Prideaux concedes that, after the Babylonish captivity, "the Hebrew language ceased to be the mother tongue of the Jews," observing that this "is agreed on all hands."
Now, what is the true significance of the foregoing specimen statements, not hostile conjectures of semi-literate Infidels, but deliberate admissions of erudite and eminent Christians? A pretty language Hebrew was, to be sure, to be used by Almighty God in the revealing of his will to men. He used, it seems, a language which had twenty-two consonants and no vowels, thereby leaving his meaning utterly unfixed and uncertain, and yet making the comprehension of his book so obligatory that on it hung the destiny for beatitude or malediction of the human race. Let my reader picture to himself a language so rude and primitive that it bungled away with its twenty-two consonants, and without a single vowel, and he will have some idea of how clearly intelligible God made himself! "It is true," admits Dr. Giles,[4] "that it might be difficult to know what vowel-sound should, in every case, be inserted among the written consonants; this was left for the reader to supply by his knowledge of the language. Thus the first word in the Hebrew Bible, being composed of the consonants b r s t, might be pronounced Barasat, Bereset, Birisit, Borosot, Burusut, and in twenty other ways, according to the combinations of the letters a, e, i, o, and u." In short, God wrote his book in such wise that the very first word in it was one uncertain thing out of twenty-five, and by this word you are to be saved or damned.
Those who know Pitman's system of phonetic stenography are aware that reporters, in taking a verbatim report of the speech of a rapid speaker, simply dash off the consonants, having no time to put in the points which, by a curious coincidence, designate the vowels with Pitman, even as they do with Jehovah. Now, any practised stenographist will tell you that he experiences less difficulty in "taking down" the speech of the orator than in deciphering the said speech after it is taken down. Owing to this elision of the vowels, the reporter encounters a difficulty, even although he knows the language well which he has been reporting, and even although, in transcribing his stenography into "long hand" for the press, he has a pretty vivid remembrance of the speaker's drift and context. To understand how impracticable it is to make either head or tail of the Holy Ghost's unvowelled Hebrew, we must suppose the reporter has to put vowels into a speech so as to make sense of it, say a thousand years after the speech was delivered, and say five centuries after the language in which it was delivered had become a dead language! He might make the first four letters in Genesis into burst, bearest, barest, borest, breast, abreast, etc., at option, according to his conception of what the Holy Ghost might have meant, rather than with a certainty as to what the Holy Ghost actually intended.
But, as though the Holy Ghost had exercised preternatural ingenuity to make it impossible for men to believe that his writings could be accurate, and thereby manage maliciously to damn the world, he threw still further difficulties in the way of any sane person receiving his book as "infallible." Ezra not only wrote the book in Hebrew—a language which, during the Babylonian captivity, had become obsolete—but, apparently because the then Jews did not know even the very letters of Hebrew, he wrote his obsolete Hebrew in Chaldean characters![5] Fancy what Macaulay's "History of England" would look like, not translated into German, but printed in German characters, and you will have some sort of vague notion of the appearance of the book which was turned out by Ezra and his five scribes to oblige Jehovah by giving him a book in the place of the one that had been burnt; and this, added to the other insuperable difficulties to which I have already alluded. To complete the analogy we must further submit that Macaulay's History had been burnt, and had to be reproduced from memory.
That the English reader may form some idea of the wide difference that existed between the Hebrew characters and the Chaldee, I here give a specimen of the real Hebrew, or true handwriting of the Holy Ghost. The passage is Deut. iv. 1, 2:—
ועתהישראלשמעאלהחקיםואלהמשפטיםאשראנכימלמדאתכםלעשותלמעןתחיוובאתםוירשתםאתהארץאשריהוהאלהיאבתיכםנתןלכםלאתספועלהדבראשראנכימצוהאתכםולאתגרעוממנולשמר
These pious gambols of black snails were turned by Ezra, when he obliged God, into square black characters like these:—
בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ[6]
What are usually regarded as the Hebrew letters are not the Hebrew letters at all, but a comparatively modern Syriac substitute of an uncertain date.
Let us try a line of English on Jehovah's plan of writing, our, however, venturing to write from left to right—not, as he did, from right to left:—
Nthbgnnnggdcrtdthhvnndthrthndmdn—fhmslfbntcrtnglnggbhchhcdrcrdthvnt.
That would be Jehovah's way of putting:—
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and made an — of himself by not creating a language by which he could record the event.
I ask any sane man whether this sort of thing is a written language at all. It may possibly be an aid to memory and a clue to conjecture; but, even as such, the aid to memory must be of the feeblest order, and the clue to conjecture vague and speculative beyond expression. And this is the manner in which "the very word of very God" was written, and in this state it remained, more or less, for over a thousand years after Hebrew had ceased to be a living language, even if we concede the absurd point urged by some theologians, that Hebrew ceased to be the language of the people, not in the days of Ezra, but in the time of Christ. Dupin, just by way of illustrating how precisely and accurately God's own holy word was understood, mentions that the translators of the Septuagint rendered a certain word chimney which Theodotius, in his version, rendered locusts! God, of course, meant either locusts or chimney—or something else. The Bible is inspired, every word and every letter; and, really, the difference between a "locust" and a "chimney" is so trifling "in the eyes of him with whom we have to do" that it is very wrong of us poor ignorant laymen not to believe all that our pastors and masters tell us, and be ready to die for the Bible, "the source of England's greatness," knowing little of what is in it, and still less of how it came there.
The high priests of the Christian Church—men of intellect and learning—know all that I here adduce, and much more of the same character; but the ordinary little sermon-spinner knows as little of it as do the devout ignoramuses who follow him into such places as Parker's Gospel huxter-shop, or into Spurgeon's tabernacle of shallow and solemn buffoonery. The ignorance of the small half educated hedge-priest keeps him honest: he believes the nonsense he preaches; his abler neighbour indulges in his enlightenment at the expense of his honesty. He has learnt to be a priest, and he can be nothing else. He cannot dig, and to beg he is ashamed; so he goes on in his vocation of parson-craft, committing himself as little as possible to concrete dogma, and thanking his stars that the damning admissions of the Church's ablest men are contained in erudite and expensive works, altogether out of the reach of the vulgar.
There is no fiction that the Protestant parsons would like to be so unequivocally accepted as fact as that the Bible is the correct and indisputable word of God; and yet all the fairly-educated among them know full well that, as Dupin alleges, "it is mere superstition to assert, as some authors do, that the Hebrew text which we have at present is not corrupted in any place, and that there is no error, nor anything left out; and that we must indispensably accept of it as correct on all occasions. This is not only to speak against all evidence and contrary to all probability, but we have excellent proof to the contrary. For, in the first place, there have been differences between the oldest of the Hebrew copies, which the Masorites have observed by that which they called Keri and Ketib; and, putting one of the readings of the text in the text and the other in the margin, we have the different readings of the Jews of the East and the Jews of the West—of the Ben-Ascher and Ben-Naphtali; and the MS. copies of the Bible do not always agree." But this sort of thing is among the trade secrets of the parsons, and you may no more expect them to admit them from the pulpit to their credulous and uninquiring dupes than you may expect an interested and unscrupulous draper to stand in front of his shop and shout "My shelves are laden with shoddy and rubbish!" when, by holding his peace, he might sell his shoddy and rubbish as, and at the price of, excellent broad-cloth.
- ↑ Matthew iii. 17; xvii. 5. John xii. 28.
- ↑ "A Complete History of the Canon and Writers of the Old and New Testament."
- ↑ "Connection of Sacred and Profane History."
- ↑ "Hebrew Records."
- ↑ According to Scaliger, Casuabon, Vossius, Grotius, Bishop Walton, Louis Cappel, Dr. Prideaux, and other Biblical philologists and critics. Vide Hartwell Horne's "Introduction," vol. ii., page 7.
- ↑ ha-arets
the earth ve-eth
and it hasshamayim
the heavens eth
them elohim
gods bara
created Bereshith
In the beginning
(Read from right to left.)