the usage of the Piel of . If this affords evidence of weight, and of a certain character, in favor of the alleged primary physical meaning, its evidence may possibly be so supplemented and confirmed by the other items of evidence, as to become very strong, perhaps even decisive. But if this source of evidence is found to be empty, then all the others are empty.

Professor Green, in his larger Hebrew Grammar, page 102, counts the Piel of this verb as an intensive: "to create, as God, Pi. to form with pains and labour, as man." This notion is at least a possible one, and is equally so whether we suppose the meaning of the Piel to have been derived from that of the Qal, or that of the Qal from that of the Piel, or each from some more primitive meaning of the root. But if all the instances of the Piel which occur are such as may derive their meaning directly from the well-known meaning of the Qal, this would seem to be the preferable explanation.

, in the Qal, expresses divine origination. The creation of the heavens and the earth is the instance of divine origination which has mainly attracted the attention of mankind. In our thoughts of creation two conceptions are especially prominent, namely, the reducing of chaos to order, and the construction of the world and its contents. Evidently, a derivative from the verb which expresses these ideas might appropriately describe men as reducing confused elements to order, or as constructing plans or objects.

The

We turn now to the direct consideration of the instances. events recorded in Joshua are substantially the following. Certain cities which fell within the proper boundary of Manasseh, to the South, were given to Ephraim. In compensation there were assigned to Manasseh, six cities of Issachar and Asher, with the territory surrounding them. These lay mostly on eminences in the valley of Jezreel, and in the valleys opening from Jezreel, toward Jordan and toward the Mediterranean. This was, in theory, a good arrangement for both Ephraim and Manasseh; but practically it was discounted by the fact that the Canaanite lowlanders had chariots of iron. In the circumstances, the tribe of Joseph remonstrated with Joshua, saying that they had but one lot, which was not enough for them, because they were a great people whom God had blessed hitherto. "And Joshua said unto them: ‘If thou art a great people get thee up toward the forests and make a clearing for thyself there () in the land of the Perizzite and the Rephaim, since the mountain country of Ephraim is narrow for thee.'" The men of Joseph rejoined that the mountain country was not altogether theirs, and that the men of Beth Shean and the Jezreelite valley had chariots of iron, which rendered that part of their possessions quite unavailable. "And Joshua said to the house of Joseph, to Ephraim and to Manasseh, saying: 'Thou art a great people, and great strength is thine: thine will not be one lot; for a mountain district will

be thine, since it is a forest and thou wilt make it a clearing (in877), and its outlets will be thine since thou wilt bring the Canaanite into possession, because he has chariots of iron, because he is strong.''

Now, however men may differ here as to the cast of the events, or the translation, or as to whether the forest here spoken of is literal forest, or a figure of speech for the Perizzites and Rephaim, there is no doubt in the mind of any one that this word 2d pret. sing. masc. Piel of is here used in the sense of making a clearing in a forest. It is also evident that if means to cut, its intensive meaning, to cut by the wholesale, would be quite appropriate to the kind of cutting by which a forest is cleared. It is equally manifest that if the speaker on this occasion was a man who was accustomed to think of God's creating the world as his clearing away of the elements of chaos and confusion, and reducing them to order, he might very appropriately have exhorted the boastful tribe of Joseph to cease complaining, and show their greatness by creating habitable country out of that part of their assigned territory which was then unfit for their habitation. This meaning fits the context at least as well as the other.

It is further evident that the thing here mainly intended is the clearing, and not the cutting process by which the clearing is effected. The Septuagint and Vulgate both distinctly recognize this. The Septuagint translates ἐκάθαρον and ἐκκαθαρεῖς. The Vulgate translates, not, as is often asserted, by succido, "to cut down," but by the phrases, “succide tibi spatia," "succides tibi atque purgabis ad habitandum spatia." The instance in Ezek. xxiii. 47 is substantially parallel. In it the fate of Aholah and Aholibah is thus described: "And an assembly shall hurl stone upon them, and [shall proceed to] clear them off ( ) with their swords; their sons and their daughters they shall kill, and their houses they shall burn with fire." Here, as in the instances in Joshua, it is easy to explain as meaning to hack or to cut down. But if there is any cutting here, no stress is laid upon it. The stress is laid upon the clearance that is to be made of all the kindred of the two harlots. The prominent thought is of the bringing of order out of disorder, through these severe measures.

In the parallel passage in Ezek. xvi. 40, "And they shall bring up upon thee an assembly, and they shall stone thee with stones, and slaughter thee with their swords, and burn thy houses," &c., the verb is pe, which occurs nowhere else, and whose meaning will follow the meaning assigned to in the passage in hand.

The punishment here described is like that assigned to apostacy in Deut. xiii. 10, 15, 16, in which the person who has been guilty is to be put to death by stoning, but in the case of an apostate city, the inhabitants and cattle are to be slain with the sword, and the spoil heaped up in the midst of the city, and burned along with the houses.

Ezek. xxi. 24 may be thus translated: "Now do thou, O son of man, set for thee two ways for the sword of the king of Babylon to enter: from one land let both of them go forth: and construct (1) a hand (or, by hand), at a head of a way of a city construct: a way thou wilt set for a sword to enter Rabbath of the sons of Ammon and Judah that is fortified in Jerusalem." Then the text speaks of the king of Babylon stopping at the junction of two roads, to decide, by divination, along which he will pursue his conquests.

There are differences of opinion as to the syntax and the meaning of this, but they do not affect the use here made of

The view taken

by Schröder may answer the purpose as well as any. He supposes that the prophet is "to place before himself on a table or tablet a sketch of the nature mentioned." On this tablet he is to construct a “hand,” that is a finger-post or something of that kind, at the head of the two ways in the sketch. The thing described by is this constructing process. It is easy to connect with it the idea of cutting, by saying that the "hand" or the sketch itself was to be engraved on the tablet. It is equally easy to derive the idea of construction, on the part of man, from that of the divine creative construction.

Substantially the same analysis will apply, if we suppose that the prophet is directed to construct an actual monument of some sort at the junction of two actual roads. We can connect the idea of cutting with his act, by supposing that the monument is to be hewn out of wood or stone, but, as in the former interpretation, it is the construction, and not the cutting process, which is essential to the writer's meaning.

On the evidence, it is not claimed that the current etymology of is disproved. But it is claimed that this etymology is not solidly 'enough grounded to make it a safe basis for important arguments.

The Syriac Apocalypse.

BY PROF. ISAAC H. HALL, PH. D.

name.

I.-Source of the Text.

The Apocalypse forms no part of any of the Syriac versions of the New Testament to which we are accustomed to give a collective That is, it does not exist in the Peshitto, the Harklensian, the Jerusalem, or the Curetonian. The Peshitto version is now universally provided with a supplement, comprising the Apocalypse and the lacking Epistles (2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude); but at least eight editions* appeared without it. In 1599 Elias Hutter first supplied these missing books (along with the Epistle to the Laodiceans in Greek, &c.), in his dodecaglott New Testament, in Syriac of his own making.

But Hutter's version has not held any important place. In 1627, Louis de Dieu published the Apocalypse at Leyden (Elzevirs, 4 to.), from a MS. that had been bequeathed to the University of Leyden by Joseph Scaliger; and in 1630 Edward Pococke published (also at Leyden, Elzevirs, 4 to.) the four lacking Epistles, from a MS. in the Bodleian library at Oxford. Since then these five books have been published with the Peshitto version, so as to furnish a complete Syriac New Testament; but no new sources of the text have been used. The later editors, moreover, have not scrupled to change or add to the vocalizing, nor to correct what they supposed to be manifest errors; yet not so far as to supply some of the larger palpable omissions in the Apocalypse.

* These were those of Widmanstadt, 1565; Tremellius, 1568 (9), 1571; Plantinus (Guido le Fevre de la Boderie-Antwerp Polyglott), 1571; Plantinus, n. d. [circ. 1573], 8 vo., 1575, 16 mo.; Paris (Guido le F. de la B.), 1584; Trost, 1621 (22).

It is the purpose of this paper to discuss certain matters connected with the Syriac Apocalypse; especially those which concern its origin, its place with reference to the Syriac versions of the bulk of the New Testament, and its general value, so far as they can be learned from internal evidence.

A word about the external evidence is, however, first in order. In the edition just mentioned, in his dedicatory letter to Daniel Heinsius, De Dieu says of the MS.: "inter libros, à magno illo litterarum omnium lumine Josepho Scaligero Academiæ huic nostræ legatos, latere manuscriptum exemplar Syriacæ versionis Apocalypseos." In the "Præfatio ad candidum Lectorem," he describes it farther: "this little book which we are editing was obtained from our public library, where, among many other noble books bequeathed to our University by the illustrious Joseph Scaliger, it lay long concealed hitherto. It is a little book in octavo, of thick, stiff and polished paper, very nearly like parchment, written in an elegant and truly Syrian hand, but very different from this [printed] character of ours. It seems to be the hand which the Maronites employ in writing letters, where they use characters more compact, and often united in ligaWe do not find the vowels added, except in a few places, where you will find them printed. The book has no versicular division of its own, nor of chapters either, except where they have been written in numerals of our fashion by some unknown reader. Nevertheless, it has various division marks for the sentences, of which some seem to mark the longer, others the shorter periods. These we have here omitted without scruple, both because the printer did not have them, and also because we did not discover any fixed use of them. For sometimes a whole page has none, sometimes one [page] has many, and not seldom accumulated for the sake of elegance alone, without any distinction of sense. The first sort are made of four red points in quadrangular form about a black circle made in an oval shape; the second sort, of four points alone, the two vertical ones in red, the others horizontal, black. Some are denoted [by us] in one way, others in another. But the rest of the distinctions of the parts and members of the sentence we have observed as well as we could. Of the author of this version we are ignorant; but the name of the writer of the book we have found at the end of the book, where he names himself Caspar born Logo Ji), but is silent as to the time of the subscription of the book."

This subscription, as De Dieu translates it, reads: "Orate pro eo qui scripsit, Casparo, ex regione Hanravitarum." But it had been