indeed, carried off all that remained, but only from a small district, which had been wasted by three years of war and a very long siege of Samaria, the horrors of which we can infer from those of other sieges in that ill-fated country.

I do not believe that in either case the number of the deported, including men, women, and children, exceeded thirty thousand. Of these, many must have perished on the journey across or around the Syrian desert, from fatigue, hunger, and exposure.

We should next observe that the places to which these exiles were carried are well known and at a moderate distance from their native land, and in constant communication with it at all times. Media, the most distant of these places, is mentioned very often in the Mishna and Talmud as containing numbers of Jews. The exiled subjects of king Pekah were taken to Assyria, which does not mean the whole Assyrian empire, with all its outlying dependencies, but Assyria proper, that is, the country around Nineveh. It is no wonder, therefore, that the exiles from Galilee and Gilead were never heard of in later ages. Not more than a hundred years after they came into their new homes Nineveh itself was destroyed and razed to the ground, and every trace of it blotted out; its site even was forgotten, till its palaces and libraries were brought to light in our own days by the labors of Layard. The two million or more of people who lived in the intrenched region known as Nineveh, which it took a three days' journey to walk through, vanished away as if by magic; and when Zenophon and his ten thousand crossed the country on his famous retreat, he calls it Media, never speaks of the Assyrian race at all, and does not mention a village even as marking the site of the capital of Sargon, Sennacherib, and Assurbanipal. Along with those millions of Assyrians the few descendants of the exiles of Galilee and Gilead, if indeed they kept up their identity during those one hundred years, perished also.

This leaves the second deportation for us to consider; that is, the remnant of Ephraim, and of half Manasseh, which remained in and around Samaria, after all those who feared the Lord, that is, all who had a strong national and religious feeling as Israelites, had in the reigns of Rehoboam and of Asa moved over into the kingdom of Judah. These were distributed where? According to the authority of Gesenius, Halah is the northernmost province of Assyria proper on the east bank of the Tigris. Habor is on the river Gozan, which runs through Mesopotamia, a region still known to the Greeks as Gauzanitis. And some went to the cities

of Media. Here were at the utmost thirty thousand persons, wholly devoid of any strong feeling for the religion of Israel, scattered over a distance of about four hundred miles between Habor and Media. In Halah and Habor they found both language and religion similar to their own. Those in Halah probably perished in great numbers along with the grandsons of their conquerors at the fall of Nineveh. If among those at Habor there were any that had not forgotten all about their Hebrew origin, they may have joined themselves to the exiles from Judah, who came into the same country after the fall of Jerusalem. If there were any Israelites in Mesopotamia still known as such, but distinct from the Jews, it is very certain that the books of Ezra and Nehemiah would make some mention of them. The apocryphal fourth book of Esdras and Josephus refer to the failure of Ezra to restore the numerous descendants of the ten tribes, but these accounts are given five hundred years after the fact, and are deemed wholly fabulous. According to other authorities, Habor is distinct from Gozan, and both of them in Media. But even on the first assumption, which I take from Gesenius, there remain those of the exiles who went to the cities of Media which are still to be considered.

These, though few in numbers, had a better chance to retain some trace of identity. They came among a people speaking a nou-Semitic language, and whose customs and costumes differed greatly from those of Canaan and Syria. And perhaps of these a trace has been preserved to this day. A Semitic dialect being a form of Syriac, differing greatly from the classic Syriac of Edessa, is still spoken by some thirty or forty thousand so-called Chaldean Christians in the Median now Kurdish mountains. For a long time all of them, and even now many of them, belong to the Nestorian church, which does not admit the equality of the Son to the Father. Perhaps this is an outcropping of the old Hebrew spirit, to which the Nicene Creed was an insurmountable stumbling-block. This is, of course, a mere guess; but if there is any visible representative of the lost tribes, it must be this little community of illiterate peasants and shepherds, the Nestorians of Kurdistan.

Let us now return from the lost to the preserved.

Those whom Nebuchadnezzar led from Jerusalem to Babylon, and whose descendants upon their return, first under Zerubbabel, and later on under Ezra and Nehemiah, laid the foundation of the second Hebrew commonwealth, belonged, as we have shown before, to the following tribes:

First, Priests and Levites; then Judah, Benjamin, Simeon, Ephraim, and Manasseh, not to mention a few adhesions from other sources. These spoke the classic dialect of Hebrew, known as Yehudith, that is, Judaic, the dialect of the southwest, that is, of Jerusalem and its surroundings. This word "Yehudith" is found in Isaiah as denoting the language spoken at Jerusalem; and again Nehemiah thus calls the dialect, to which that great commonwealth-builder endeavored to hold his countrymen. He inveighed against them when they took for wives women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab, whose children would learn their dialect, and be unable to speak Yehudith or Judaic.

Now there was also a dialect of northern Palestine, which is little else than the Phoenician of Tyre, and which I call for short Galilean. At least one book of the Old Testament, the Song of Songs, is written in it. When reduced to writing, the chief and only striking difference between it and Judaic is that the English "which" is she in Galilean, and asher in Judaic. But when read, the divergence is so great that one used to the Galilean system, now used by the German and Polish Jews, can hardly understand Hebrew that is read in the true Jewish style, which is known in our days as the Portuguese pronunciation, and which is followed by the Jews formerly settled in Spain and Portugal, and now scattered through north Africa, Italy, and Turkey, and in some congregations of Holland, England, the West Indies, and the United States.

Throughout the existence of the second temple, the Judaic pronunciation was so far considered the standard, that all the transliterations into Greek proceeded from it alone. For instance, the names of Adam and Abraham, which we find in the Septuagint, would in Galilean style be Odom and Avrohom. The change of the long o would, in the northern dialect, turn the name Lot into something like Lout or Löt. The short, open vowel in unaccented syllables, which the Greek version always preserves, is entirely swallowed in the northern dialect. Thus the Greek version gives us in good Judaic the names Samuel, Sodom, Salomon, Zorobabel, which in the mouth of the German Jews are Sh'muel, S'doum, Sh'loumou, Z'rubbovel. But the dialectic weakness of the Galileans, which most displeased their Judaic brethren, and for which they almost excommunicated them, was their inability to sound the peculiar guttural click denoted by the letter 'Ayin. This the Greek writers could not transliterate except in a few words in which the sound is harder than

usual, and approaches that of the Gamma. Thus the Greek version gives us Gomorrha and Gaza, which are to the German Jew Amouro and Azzo, without any trace of the initial consonant.

Both the gospel writers and Josephus were Galileans, yet in writing Greek they start from the Judaic sounds. To do otherwise would have looked very much like writing a sermon or history in the jargon of the backwoods, or in the orthography of Josh Billings and Artemas Ward.

These differences in sounding the vowels and the dropping of the 'Ayin and other gutturals, applied not only to the Hebrew, which always remained the language of the Synagogue, but also to Aramaic, which about or soon after the time of Alexander the Great became the language of Judea, and, somewhat later, also the language of Galilee.

We find the distinction of the northern and southern dialects referred to, both in the New Testament and in the Talmud. A story in the latter speaks of a Galilean who comes to Jerusalem to buy something, and asks: Imar l'man? "Who has wool?" it may mean, or "who has a sheep," or "who has a donkey," according to the different gutturals with which the word in its various meanings begins; and he is mocked by the mob of the capital for failing to make himself understood.

But after the destruction of the Temple the North came by its rights. Both in Aramaic and in Hebrew, the northern dialects prevailed. The so-called Syriac of Antioch and Edessa became by its copious Christian literature the classic branch of Aramaic ; and in Hebrew the vowel signs, now in universal use, were contrived at Tiberias in Galilee, with a view to the Galilean pronunciation, with five simple vowels, to be read a, e, i, o, u, and the two diphthongs ai and au,1 and the same sign of the short, open, unaccented vowel, as for the absence of all vowels.

Now what is all this to our purpose? Only as it bears upon the history of Galilee; for aside from what the philologist can guess, during the critical period neither Galilee nor all Israel has any history at all.

The last portion of Old Testament history, the rebuilding of Jerusalem by Nehemiah, under the reign of Artaxerxes Longhand, comes down to about 440 B. C. From this date to the time of Antiochus the persecutor we have no source for Jewish history but Josephus.

That no record of passing events was kept or preserved is best 1 These vowels are to be understood in their continental sounds. VOL. XII. - NO. 68.

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proved by the following odd mistake, which the Talmudic writers fell into. They had a tradition that the second temple stood four hundred and twenty years. This is true, and refers to the temple built by Nehemiah in 440 B. C., and replaced in 20 B. C. by Herod's much larger and more splendid edifice. But in a passage in the treatise Baba Bathra, this period of four hundred and twenty years is reckoned from the setting up of the first altar by Zerubbabel in the reign of Darius Hystaspis, say 518 B. C., to the final destruction of the Temple by Titus A. D. 70; an error of no less than one hundred and seventy-eight years. So the history of Israel, after Ezra, must have been a perfect blank to a not very remote generation; and the absence of all known incidents led to the natural belief that the time could not have been near as long as it really was. The present Jewish count of the Anno Mundi is based on this mistaken statement in the Talmud.

If, then, we know very little about the whole people of Israel during the two hundred and fifty years that elapsed between Nehemiah and the first troubles which preceded the Maccabean war, it is no wonder that we know next to nothing about who was then in Galilee or east of the Jordan. The few facts told by Josephus refer mainly to the High Priest, to the temple, to Jerusalem.

Yet there is a slight clew. The story of Josephus as to how the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek by seventy or seventy-two elders, chosen six from each of the twelve tribes, at the request of Ptolemy Philadelphus, about 270 B. C., is most probably a fable; not, however, an invention of Josephus, but of much older growth. The existence of such a fable shows that men claiming descent from all the twelve tribes might be found among the Israelites (though commonly called Jews) of the Second Temple.

About fifty years later, Josephus notices that Ptolemy Philopator seized Judea and made war on the inhabitants of CoeleSyria, and "took many of their cities, and particularly our nation who went over to him." It seems, therefore, that the Jews had by this time spread northward even beyond the borders of Palestine to that narrow valley along the Lebanon known as CoeleSyria. In the next generation we find Hyrcanus, the son of Joseph, governing a little Hebrew state, near Heshbon, east of the Jordan. Soon after this the Maccabean troubles break out; and one of the best known incidents in the life of the heroic Judah are the messages seeking his help, both from Galilee and