NOTE A.

THE SEMITIC FAMILY.

The various languages included under this term are a group of cognate dialects rather than a family of widely varied branches, and are commonly divided into the Northern, or Aramaic; the Middle, or Hebraic; and the Southern, or Arabic, as shown in the following table, which is copied from Prof. Max Müller's Lect. on Language, vol. i., p. 450.

Chaldee is the name sometimes given to the dialects of Assyria and Babylon, which were adopted by the Jews during the captivity, not only for conversation, but as

their literary language. The earliest records of it occur in the books of Ezra and Daniel, and it was probably the language of several of the Apocryphal books, although these have come down to us in Greek alone. Other relics are the Targums, or free translations of the Old Testament, and the Talmuds, while the untranslated sayings in the New Testament, attributed to Jesus, as Talitha kumi, Ephphatha, Abba, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, are Aramaic, then the vernacular of Palestine.

Syriac, or Western Aramaic, is still spoken in a corrupt form by certain tribes in Mesopotamia, and among the most important specimens of it which are preserved is the Peshito version of the Bible, ascribed to the second century.

The cuneiform, like the Egyptian hieroglyph, has its origin in picture-writing, but lost its elaborate form through the desire and need for simplicity necessitated by the softer material on which, as contrasted with the Egyptian, it had to be traced. The signs were more easily indented on mud and clay slabs by sharp and straight strokes made with a triangular stylus (whence our word style) and then baked in the sun or by fire. Great ingenuity has been applied to their decipherment, and as the famous Rosetta stone, with its inscription in three languages, the hieroglyphic, demotic (chiefly phonetic), and Greek, supplied the key to the Egyptian picture-writing, so the inscription on the rocks at Behistun in Media, on which Darius Hystaspes relates his enterprises in three cuneiform characters, the Persian, Median, and Assyrian, rendered great service in unravelling the meaning of the queer wedge-shaped strokes which had been pronounced talismanic signs, symbols, and charms, and even as due to the destructive activity of worms!

Hebrew ceased to exist as a spoken tongue some four centuries B.C., but it remained, as it remains to this day, the sacred language of the Jews, and the study of the learned.

The Samaritan is an impure dialect of the Hebrew, having a very large admixture of Aramaic words. Its oldest monument is a version of the Pentateuch, of which an admirable account is given in Deutsch's Lit. Remains, pp. 404, et. seq.

Of the Phænician but few traces survive, only inscriptions on coins and weights, on votive tablets, sacrificial stones, tombstones, and on sarcophagi (Deutsch, p. 155) the inscribed coffin of a king of Sidon being its chief monument.

Of the Arabic group, the most ancient relics are the Himyaritic inscriptions, the date of which is unknown. Although the earliest documents are pre-Mohammadan, it was with the rise of Islam that Arabic became one of the richest literatures in the world, and, as the many words still employed in science show, the vehicle of learning, spreading over the civilized parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

NOTE B.

THE NAME JEHOVAH.

The peculiar feature of the Semitic languages is that the consonants are everything, and the vowels nothing, every word consisting, in the first instance, merely of three consonants, which form, so to speak, the soul of the idea to be expressed by that word." And as in ancient

times the consonants only were written, the name Jehovah appeared as J HV H. Its exact pronunciation is utterly lost, and, as we saw, such veneration gathered round it that when the Jews came to it they substituted some other name, usually Adonai. Afterwards, when vowels were added to the Hebrew text, those in Adonai, or its phonetic form Edona, were inserted between the letters of the sacred name, and thus J HV H was written JeHoVaH.

Although its first appearance in Israelitish history remains obscure, the arguments of Kuenen (Religion of Israel, vol. i., pp. 398 et seq.) conclusively refute the reasoning of Laud, Goldziher and others who contend that it is post-Mosaic and assign it to the period of the "awakening idea of nationality” among the Israelites, ¿.e. until their settlement in Canaan. Its connection, now generally admitted, with the verb to be justifies the interpretation attached to it in Exodus iii. 14, “I am that I am," by which may be understood, "He that is" or, as including the being whose "verb has no tenses;" the "Eternal." Curious correspondences, for no more than these dare we call them, are the nuk pu nuk, "I am he who I am," of the Egyptian “Book of the Dead,” and the declaration of Ahuramazda to Zarathustra (Ormuzd Yasht, Haug. p. 195) “I am who I am, Mazda," while Brugsch states that ankh, the divinity worshipped at Pithom, which city the Israelites enlarged while in bondage, means "he who lives" or "the Living One," and ventures the suggestion that it affords a clue to the meaning attached to the Hebrew Jehovah. The last word has not been spoken on this matter, perhaps it never will be ; but that a semi-barbarous people like the Israelites evolved, while in the polytheistic stage of development, the philosophical ideas of "being," ultimately connected with