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![1] 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.
- ↑ 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.
