Genesis 11:10-32

FIFTH SECTION

The race of Shem. The Commenced and Interrupted Migration of Terah to Canaan. The Genesis of the Contrast between Heathendom and the germinal Patriarchalism

Genesis 11:10-32

1. Genealogy of Shem—to Terah.

10These are the generations of Shem: Shem was a hundred years old and begat 11Arphaxad [Knobel: probably, highland of Chaldæa] two years after the flood. And Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. 12And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah [sending]: 13And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters. 14And Salah lived thirty years and begat Eber [one from the other side, pilgrim, emigrant]. 15And Salah lived after he begat Eber four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters. 16And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg [division]: 17And Eber lived after he begat Peleg four hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters. 18And Peleg lived thirty years, and begat Reu [friendship, friend]: 19And Peleg lived after he begat Reu two hundred and nine years, and begat sons and daughters. 20And Reu lived two and thirty years, and begat Serug [vine-branch]: 21And Reu lived after he begat Serug two hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters. 22And Serug lived thirty years, and begat Nahor [Gesenius: panting]: 23And Serug lived after he begat Nahor two hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. 24And Nahor lived nine and twenty years, and begat Terah [turning, tarrying]: 25And Nahor lived after he begat Terah a hundred and nineteen years, and begat sons and daughters. 26And Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abram [High father], Nahor [see Genesis 11:2], and Haran [Gcsenius: Montanus].

2. Terah, his Race and Emigration (Genesis 11:27-32).

27Now these are the generations of Terah: Terah bagat Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran begat Lot [veil, concealed]. 28And Haran died before [the face of] his father Terah, in the lend of his nativity, in Ur [light; flame] of the Chaldees (כשדים). 29And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai [princess]; and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah [Queen], the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah, and the father of Iscah [spier, seeress]. 30But Sarai was barren; she had no child. 31And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran, his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees to go unto the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran and dwelt there. 32And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years; and Terah died in Haran.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE GENEALOGICAL TABLE OF THE SHEMITES

This genealogy of the Shemites is really an appendage to that of the Sethites, Genesis 1:5, and in this way forms a genealogical series extending from Adam to Abraham. It is continued on the line of Nahor (Genesis 22:20-24), on that of Keturah (Genesis 25:1-4), of Ishmael (Genesis 25:12, etc.), of Esau (Genesis 36:1, etc.), on the line of Jacob (Genesis 46:8-27), etc. (See the article: “Genealogical Register,” in Herzog’s Real Encyclopœdie.) According to Knobel this table has the character of an element of fundamental Scripture (p. 129); we are satisfied to designate it as elohistic universalistic, since it embraces not only Abraham’s race, but also the nearest branches of it that at a later period became heathen. The table of the Shemites embraces ten generations, as does the table of the Sethites. The first (conformably to the number ten) denotes a perfect development, which runs out in Abraham, the “father of the faithful,” representing, as he does, a numberless race of the believing out of all humanity. Abraham must be reckoned here with the tenth, as Noah in Genesis 1:5. It is clear, too, that this table is designed to indicate the growth, or establishment of the patriarchal faith, together with its previous history. Most distinctly is this expressed in the migrations of Terah,—and in the individual names of the patriarchs. In the son of Arphaxad, Salah, there is announced a sending, or mission, in Eber the emigration, in Peleg the division of the theocratic line from the untheocratic, in Reu the divine friendship, in Serug the entangling or the restraint of the development, in Nahor a conflict or a striving, in Terah a setting out from the heathen world which in his tarrying comes to a stop. And so is the way prepared for Abraham’s departure. We cannot maintain, with Knobel, that these Shemitic patriarchs must have been all of them first-born. They are, throughout, the first-born only in the sense of the promise. Bunsen interprets the name Eber as one who comes over the Tigris. But in a wider sense Eber may also mean pilgrim. The names Reu and Serug he interprets of Odessa and Osroëne. As coming, however, in the midst of personal names, these also must have been expressed as personal names, from which, indeed, the names of countries may have been derived. On the interpolation of Cainan in the Septuagint, and which is followed by Luke (Gen 3:36), compare Knobel, as also on the varying dates of the ages, as given in the Samaritan text and in the Septuagint. The numbers we have here are 600, 438, 433, 464, 239, 239, 230, 148, 205, and 175 years. Here, too, as in the case of the Sethites, we can get no symbolical significance from the respective numbers, although Knobel is unwilling to recognize their historical character. In connection, however, with the general gradual diminution of the power of life, there is clearly reflected the individual difference; Eber lives to a greater age than both his forefathers, Arphaxad and Salah. Nahor, the panting (the impetuous), dies earliest. According to Knobel, the genealogical table advances from the mythical to the legendary period; at least we have no sufficient grounds, he thinks, to deny to Abraham and his brothers an historical existence. The same must hold true, also, of his fathers, whose names, with their theocratic characteristics, must have belonged, without doubt, to the most lasting theocratic reminiscences. The table before us is distinguished from the Sethitic by being less full, in that it divides the life-time of each ancestor into two parts, by the date of the theocratic first-born, whilst it leaves the summing up of both numbers to the reader. “In Genesis 11:26 this genealogy, just like the one in Genesis 5:32, concludes with the naming of three sons of Terah, since all these have a significance for the history to come: namely, Abram as the ancestor of the elect race, Nahor as the grandfather of Rebecca (comp. Genesis 11:29 with Genesis 22:20-23), and Haran as the father of Lot (Genesis 11:27).” Keil. The table in Delitzsch gives us a good view of the series of Shemitic families (p. 324). According to Bertheau the Septuagint is right in its interpolation of Cainan. Delitzsch disputes this; comp. p. 322. “The Alexandrian translators inserted this name because the Oriental traditions have so much to say of him as the founder of astronomical science; and, therefore, they were unwilling to leave out so famous a name. There may have been a brother of Salah, through whom the main line was not propagated.” Lisco. Delitzsch gives a reason for its not being called the tholedoth, or generations of Abraham, from the fact that the author makes the history of Abraham himself a large and principal part. That, however, would not have prevented the setting forth of Abraham’s genealogical history. But in such a representation there might have been, perhaps, an obscuring of the idea that the seed of Abraham in the natural sense goes through the whole Old Testament, whilst, in a spiritual sense, it pervades the New (see Romans 4 cf. Genesis 1:15).

EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL

1.Genesis 11:10. Shem was a hundred years old. See the computations of Knobel and Keil. Two years after the flood. This must be understood of the beginning of the flood. And begat sons and daughters. See the ethnological table; also, Genesis 11:17. “For the sake of tracing the line of the Joktanides the author had already given, in Genesis 10:21-25, the patriarchal series from Shem to Peleg; he repeats it here, where he would lay down fully the line from Shem to Abraham, with the addition of the ages.”—Arphaxad. Arrapachitis, “in northern Assyria, the original seat of the collective Chaldæan family.” Knobel. “It was the home of the Χαλδαῖοι and Καρδοῦχοι mentioned by Xenophon and Strabo, as well as of the modern Kurds.” The same writer refers the names that follow to cities or territories, to which we attach no special importance, since in any case the districts here would be themselves derived from the names of persons.

2.Genesis 11:27. The family line of Terah. According to Keil, this superscription must embrace the history of Abraham, so that the tholedoth of Ishmael, Genesis 25:12, and of Isaac, Genesis 25:19, correspond with it. But then, in the spiritual relation, Abraham would be subordinate to Terah, which cannot be supposed. And Haran begat. “According to the constant plan of Genesis, it is here related of Haran, the youngest son of Terah, that he begat Lot, because Lot went with Abraham to Canaan (ch, Genesis 12:4), and Haran died before his father Terah, whereby the band which would have retained Lot in his father-land was loosed.” Keil. Before his father Terah. Properly, in his presence, so that he must have seen it; it does not, therefore, mean simply in his life-time. The first case of a natural death of a son before the death of his father, is a new sign of increasing mortality. Ur of the Chaldees. This must either be sought in the name Ur, which Ammianus calls Persicum Castellum, between Patra and Nisibis, not far from Arrapachitis, or in Orhoi (Armenian, Urrhai), the old name of Edessa, now called Urfa (see Kiepert and Weissenborn: ‘Nineveh and its Territory,’ p. 7).” Keil. Delitzsch, correctly perhaps, decides for the castle Ur mentioned by Ammianus, although, doubtless, the Ur in our text has a more general, territorial, and, at the same time, symbolical meaning. “The old Jewish and ecclesiastical interpretation reads ‘out of אור’ (fire), meaning that Abraham, as an acknowledger of the one God, and a denier of the gods of Nimrod, was cast into the fire, but was miraculously preserved by God.” Delitzsch. The same writer finds therein the idea that Abraham was plucked as a brand from the fire of heathendom, or from its heathenish fury. We would rather suppose, on the contrary, that by Ur is meant a region in Chaldæa, where the ancient monotheistic symbolical view of the heavenly lights and flames had passed over into a mythical heathenish worship of the stars, as a worship of Light and Fire; wherefore it is that the starry heaven was shown to Abraham as a symbol of his believing progeny (Genesis 1:15), whilst, for the heathen Chaldæans, it was a region of divine (or deified) forces. Knobel explains the word as meaning Mount of the Chaldœans. Rawlinson holds to the reading אוּר as equivalent to עִיר (city). The interpreting it of light and fire is both etymologically and actually the more correct. “The family of Terah had its home to the north of Nimrod’s kingdom (in northeastern Mesopotamia), and worshipped strange gods; as is clear from Joshua 24:2.” Delitzsch. Iskah. By Josephus, the Talmud, the Targum of Jonathan, and others, this name is held to be one with Sarah. On the other hand, Knobel properly remarks that according to Genesis 20:12, Sarah was the daughter of Terah, and, according to Genesis 17:17, only ten years younger than Abraham; she could not, therefore, have been a daughter of Abraham’s younger brother. It is probably the case that the Jews, in deference to their later law, sought by means of this hypothesis to weaken as much as possible Abraham’s kinsmanship to Sarah. Delitzsch assumes the possibility that Haran was a much older half-brother of Abraham, and that Abraham, as also Nahor, had married one of his daughters. According to a conjecture of Ewald, Iscah is mentioned because she became Lot’s wife. But it may be that Iscah was thought worthy to be incorporated in the theocratic tradition because she was a woman of eminence, a seeress like Miriam, according to the signification of her name. Knobel alludes to the fact that Abraham bad his sister to wife, without calling to mind that she was a half-sister (Genesis 20:12), or might even have been his adopted sister. So also he says that Nahor married his niece, and that in like manner Isaac and Jacob did not marry strangers, but their own kindred. He accounts for this on the ground of a peculiar family affection in the house of Terah (Genesis 24:3-4; Genesis 26:35; Genesis 27:46; Genesis 28:1); just as at the present day many Arabian families ever marry in their own, and do not permit one to take a wife from any other (Seetzen: “Travels,” iii. p. 22). The ground, however, of such kindred marriage in the house of Terah and Abraham, is a theocratic one, and thus far are the children of Abraham placed in a condition similar to that of the children of Adam. As for the latter, there were, in general, no “daughters of men,” out of their own immediate kindred, so for the sons of the theocracy there were no spiritual daughters of like birth with themselves, that is, of monotheistic or theocratic faith, out of the circle of nearest natural affinity. In this respect, however, they did not venture to tread in the foot-steps of the Sethites (Genesis 1:6); for it was theirs to propagate a believing race through consecrated marriage. But Sarah Was barren. A prelude to the history that follows. And Terah took Abram his son. Without doubt has this removal a religious theocratic importance. At all events, this divinely accomplished withdrawal from Ur of the Chaldees must mean more than a mere providential guidance, as Keil supposes. And they went forth with them. The word אִתָּם (rendered, with them) makes a difficulty. It may be easiest understood as meaning with one another. On the other hand, Delitzsch reminds us that the suffix may have a reflex sense, instead of a reciprocal (Genesis 22:3). This is the very question, as otherwise the sentence would be indefinite; the expression, therefore, must mean not only with one another, but by themselves; that is, they withdrew as one united, exclusive community. Besides this, there are two modes of taking it. Keil understands only Lot and Sarah as the subject of the verb, and, therefore, refers אִתָּם to Terah and Abraham. There are three things in the way of this: 1. The withdrawing (or going forth) would be separated from the previous introductory expression: Terah took Abraham, etc., which will not do; 2. it would be a withdrawing from that which leads, and the accompanying would become the principal persons; 3. Abraham would have to be regarded as a co-leader, which is contrary to what is said: Terah took Abraham. Moreover, Abraham, regarded as an independent leader, would have been bound in duty to go further on when Terah broke off from his pilgrimage in Mesopotamia. Delitzsch, on the other hand, together with Jarchi, Rosenmuller, and others, refers the words they went forth to the members of the family who are not named, namely, they went forth with those named; but this is clearly against the context. By the expression with them, it would be more correct to understand, with those, namely, with the first-named (Terah, etc.), went forth those just previously mentioned, or named immediately after them. Later, is Haran denoted as the city of Nahor (Genesis 24:10 as compared with Genesis 27:43; Genesis 29:4; Genesis 31:53). For other interpretations see Knobel. And they came unto Haran. Terah intended to go from Ur to Canaan, but he stops in Haran, wherefore he also retains his people there. According to Knobel, the mention of Canaan is an anticipation of the history that follows. Haran. Carra, Charran, lay in northwestern Mesopotamia (Padan Aram, xxv. 20), ten leagues southeast from Edessa, in a fertile region, though not abounding in water. The city now lies in ruins. It was the capital of the Gabians, who had here a temple of the Moon goddess, which they referred back to the time of Abraham. In its neighborhood Crassus was slain by the Parthians. More fully on the subject, see in Schröder, p. 520; also in Knobel and Delitzsch. And Terah died in Haran. Terah was two hundred and five years old. If Abraham, therefore, was seventy-five years old when he migrated from Mesopotamia, and Terah was seventy years old at his birth, then must Abraham have set forth sixty years before the death of Terah. And this is very important. The emigration had a religious motive which would not allow him to wait till the death of his father. As Delitzsch remarks, the manner of representation in Genesis disposes of the history of the less important personages, before relating the main history. The Samaritan text has set the age of Terah at one hundred and forty-five, under the idea that Abraham did not set out on his migration until after the death of Haran. The representation of Stephen, Acts 7:4, connects itself with the general course of the narration.

DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL

See above: The significance of the genealogical table of the Shemites.

1. The decrease in the extent of human life. In the manifold weakenings of the highest life-endurance, in the genealogy of Shem, there are, nevertheless, distinctly observable a number of abrupt breaks: 1. From Shem to Arphaxad, or from 600 years to 438; 2. from Eber to Peleg, or from 464 years to 239; 3. from Serug to Nahor, or from 230 years to 148; beyond which last, again, there extend the lives of Terah with his 205, and of Abraham with his 175 years. Farther on we have Isaac with 180 years, Jacob 147, and Joseph 110. So gradually does the human term of life approach the limit set by the Psalmist, Psalms 90:10. Moses reached the age of 120 years. The deadly efficacy goes on still in the bodily sphere, although the counter-working of salvation has commenced in the spiritual. Keil, with others, finds the causes of this decrease in the catastrophe of the flood, and in the separation of humanity into various nations.

2. Chaldœa and the Chaldœans. See the Theological Real Lexicons, especially Herzog’s Encyclopœdie, The Fragments of the Chaldæan Author, Berosus, as found in the Chronicon of Eusebius, and the Chronographia of Syncellus. This people seem to have been early, and, in an especial sense, a wandering tribe. The priestly castes of Chaldæans in Babylonia must have come out of Egypt. Strabo and others transfer the land of the Chaldæans to a region in lower Babylonia, in the marshy district of the Euphrates near the Persian Gulf; the same author, however, finds also, as others have done, the seat of the Chaldæans in the Chaldæan Mountains, very near to Armenia and the Black Sea. The proper home of the Chaldæans was, therefore, at the head waters of the Tigris.

3. Ur in Chaldæa. See above.
4. On the indication of a great yet gradual provision for the variance that was to take place between the race of Eber and the heathen, see the Exegetical and Critical. The later Biblical accounts of Terah and the forefathers of Abraham appear, in general, to owe their form to the reciprocal influence of Israelitish tradition and the Israelitish exegesis of the passage before us. According to the language of Stephen, Acts 7:2, Abraham was already called at Ur in Chaldæa. We must, therefore, regard him as the proper author of the migration of his father, Terah. The passage, Joshua 24:2, according to which Abraham’s forefathers, and Terah especially, dwelt beyond the river (the Euphrates), and served other gods, has special relation to this fact of Terah’s suffering himself to be detained in Haran. This, then, is to be so understood, that in consequence of the universal infection, idolatry began to take up its abode very near to the adoration of the one God, as still maintained in Terah’s family (see Genesis 29:32-33; Genesis 29:35; Genesis 30:24; Genesis 30:27; and to this belongs what is said, Genesis 31:34, about the teraphim of Laban). We may well suppose that Joshua, from his stern, legal stand-point, judged and condemned that mingling of worships, or that image worship, as strongly as Moses did the setting up of the golden calf. The little group of wanderers, Genesis 11:31, appears to have originated from a similarity of feeling which, after long conflicts in the line of Eber, was finally to tear itself away from this conjectural capital of the Light and Fire worship in Chaldæa, and, in that way, from heathenism altogether. Their aim was Canaan, because there, partly from their decidedly foreign state, partly by reason of their antagonism to the Hamitic race, they would be protected from the contagion. But Terah cannot get beyond Haran, and to this not only does Joshua refer, but also the later Jewish tradition respecting Terah. To this place, where he settles down, Terah seems to have given the name of his dead son, in loving remembrance, and it may have been this name, as well as the fair land and apparent security, that bound him there. The circumstance that Abraham, according to Genesis 11:32, does not appear to have departed before the death of Terah (with which, however, the history otherwise does not agree), has been interpreted by Syncellus and others as implying that Terah was spiritually dead. A like untenable Jewish hypothesis, which Hieronymus gives us, assumes that the 75 years which are ascribed to Abraham, Genesis 12:4, are not to be dated from his natural birth, but from the time of his deliverance from the furnace of fire, which was like a new birth. But that Abraham tore himself away before his father’s death has, at all events, the important meaning that, in the strife between filial piety and the call of faith, he obeyed the higher voice. The family group in Haran, however, is thus distinctly denoted, because it now forms the provisional earthly homestead of the wandering patriarchs, and because, also, as the later history informs us, it was to furnish wives of like theocratic birth for their sons.

5. Legends concerning the migration of Abraham. See Rahmer, “The Hebrew Traditions” (Breslau, 1861, p. 24). According to a Hebrew Midrash (Rabba 38, in Hieronymus), Abraham, at Ur, was cast into a furnace of fire, because he would not adore the fire which the Chaldæans worshipped, but was miraculously preserved by God. His brother Haran, on the contrary, was consumed, because he was unresolved whether to adore the fire or not. It was Nimrod who had him cast into the furnace. Here belongs, also, the Treatise of Beer, entitled “The Life of Abraham, according to the Jewish traditions.” Leip., 1859.

HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL

As Abraham’s life of faith develops itself in his posterity, so did it have its root in the life of his forefathers. How the life of all great men of God rests upon a previous hidden history. Comparison of the two lines of faith, that of Seth to Noah, and from Shem to Abraham: 1. outwardly, ever less (at last reduced to one point); 2. inwardly, ever stronger (attaining at last to the one who makes the transition). [Thus Noah passed through the corrupted race and through the flood; thus Abraham made the transition through heathenism.]—Terah’s migration to Canaan: 1. its spirited beginning; 2. its failure to go on. Abraham and his kinsmen: 1. He was probably the author of their movement; 2. they, probably, the cause of his tarrying in Haran. The death of children before the eyes of their parents (Genesis 11:28). Sarah’s barrenness, the long and silent trial in the life of Abraham.

Starke: The Sethites, among whom the true church is preserved. God’s remembrance of the righteous abides in his blessing. Osiander: A Christian when he is called, must, for the sake of God, leave joyfully his fatherland; he must forsake all that he loves, all that is pleasing to him in the world; he must follow God obediently, and only where He leads.

[Excursus on the Confusion of Languages. That there was here a supernatural intervention the language of Scripture will not permit us to doubt. We need not, however, trouble ourselves with the question how far each variety of human speech is connected with it, or regard, as essentially affecting the argument, the greatness or smallness of the number of languages now spoken upon the earth. There is, doubtless, many a local jargon, the result of isolation, or of unnatural mixtures, that has but little, if anything, to do with an inquiry in respect to this most ancient and world-historical event. It is so difficult to determine what is a language in distinction from a dialect, or mere local variety of idiom and pronunciation, that such lists as those of Balbi and others can have but little philological value. For all essential purposes of such inquiry, therefore, there is no need to extend our view beyond that district of earth in which languages now existing, either as spoken or in their literature, can be historically or philologically traced to peoples connected with the earliest known appearances of the human race. We give this a very wide sweep when we include in it Southern and Middle Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa. Here philological science, though yet very imperfect, has found great encouragement in its inquiries, and within this district has it begun to make out, with some clearness, what must have been the earliest divisions of language. The result thus far, as stated by some of the latest and best writers, has been the recognition of three general families or groups. In giving names to these, there has also been recognized, to some extent, the ethnological division supposed to be made from the sons of Noah; and hence some have been inclined to call them the Japhethic, Shemitic, and Hamitic (Bunsen, Khamism and Semism). It was early perceived, however, that the ethnologic and linguistic lines do not exactly correspond even in the Shemitic; and there is still more of aberration and intersection within the supposed limits of the two others. The first group has therefore been called the Indo-Germanic, and of late the Arian. In the third the term Hamitic has been generally dropped for that of Turanian. The general correspondence, however, gives much countenance to the first ethnological naming. But whatever method be adopted, it does not affect the main characteristics belonging to each of the three. These may be thus stated. The Shemitic is the smallest, the most unique, both in its matter and its form, the most enduring, the most easily recognized, and having the least diversity in its several branches. The group termed Arian, Indo-Germanic, or Japhethan, is less marked in all these characteristics, though retaining enough of them to make clear the family relationship in all the best-known branches. The third is so different from both these, it seems so utterly broken up, that Pritchard, and other philologists, have given it, as a whole, the name Allophylian, using it simply as a convenience of nomenclature. There exist, however, marks of affinity that show it to be something more than a mere arbitrarily separated mass (see Max Müller “Languages of the Seat of War,” pp. 88, 90, and Rawlinson: “Herodotus,” vol. i. 524). To make use of geological analogies, as Bunsen has done, the Shemitic may be likened to the primitive rocks, the Arian to the stratified formations, broken, yet presenting much clearness of outline and direction, the Turanian to confused volcanic masses projected from some force unknown, or solitary boulders scattered here and there in ways inexplicable, yet showing marks of the localities from whence they came, and evidence of some original correspondence in the very irregularities of their fracture. Or we may compare them, the first, to a temple still entire in its structural form, though presenting tokens of catastrophes by which it has been affected; the second, to wide-spread ruins, where whole architectural rows and avenues still show a clear coherence, whilst even the broken arches, fallen columns, displaced capitals, give evidence by which we are enabled to make out the original plan; the third, to scattered mounds of rubbish, in which shattered slabs, obscurely stamped bricks, and faint marks of some joining cement, alone testify to a structure having once a local unity at least, though now exhibiting little of inward plan and harmony. To drop all such figures, it may be said that the Shemitic has preserved what was most enduring of the original form, the Arian what was most permanent of the original matter, whilst in the Turanian has fallen all that was most frangible in the one, or most easily deformed or defaced in the other.

Now to account for such a condition of things in language, especially in its earliest appearance, is equally difficult, whether we hypothesize the primitive movement as a tendency to gregariousness and to a consequent unity of speech, or as a tendency in the opposite direction, or as being both combined in an attractive and repulsive polarity. The phenomena in each and all are at war with every such induction. There is in the one family a strangely preserved unity. There is in another a totally different peculiarity of form stamped upon it from times that precede all historical memory; it is full where the first seems to be scant, free where the other is tense; sometimes just the reverse, having as a whole a look so exceedingly foreign as never to be mistaken, yet with an equally unmistakable familiarity, or family likeness, of its own, within which the many dissimilitudes among its different branches never efface the strong and seemingly ineradicable affinities. There is a third so marked by an almost total dissolution that its very looseness would seem to make its only classifying feature, were it not that certain indices found in every branch (such as the numerals and some pronominal forms), point to a community of origin, whilst appearances of correspondence, even in its fractures, suggest a common disorganizing catastrophe. Viewing these three families in their relations to each other, we find that there is not only separation, and that of long standing, but great diversity of separation. The original cleaving dates from a most ancient period, before which nothing is known, and in its general aspect remains unaffected by time. The Hamitic, or Turanian, seems to have been confused and tumultuous from the beginning. Such is said to be its appearance on the early trilingual inscriptions made to accommodate the incongruous peoples in the Assyrian empire who had, in some way, been here and there wedged between the Arian and Shemitic portions. See Rawlinson’s “Herodotus,” i. 527. Again, the Shemitic, though oftentimes in close contiguity, has put on none of the essential features of the Arian, nor the Arian of the Shemitic. The German and Arabic are as distinct in modern times, as anciently the Greek and Hebrew. The minor specific divisions in each family have varied more or less, but the great generic differences have remained the same from age to age, still showing no signs of blending, or of mutual development into some common comprehending genus, according to the process which Bunsen supposes to have produced such changes in the antehistorical times. What has stamped them with features so ancient and so diverse? Nothing of any known natural development, either of one from the other, or of all from a common antecedent stock, can account for it. If Sinism, or Chinesian (the name given to this hypothetical beginning of human speech), developed Khamism, and Khamism Semism, and Semism Arianism, how is it that we find nothing like it as actual fact in historical times, and no marks of any transition-period in the ages before? Surely, if Bunsen’s favorite comparisons be good for anything, we ought to find in language, as geologists do in the rocks, the visible marks of the process, or if we are compelled to adopt a theory of sudden or eruptive breakings in the one case (whether we call them supernatural or extraordinary matters but little to the argument) why should a similar idea be regarded as irrational in the other. Thus there are no linguistic marks in Greek and Hebrew (regarded as early representatives of two great families), or in Syriac and Sanscrit, showing that at any time they were a common language, or any beginning of mutual divergency as traced downwards, or any evidences of convergency as we follow them up the stream of time. In fact, they stand in most direct contrast in their earliest stages; even as the fresh geological rupture must present, doubtless, a more distinct breakage than is shown after ages of wear and abrasion. When history opens, these languages stand abruptly facing each other. This may be said with some degree of confidence, for our knowledge here is not scanty. We have the Shemitic all along from the very dawn of history to our latest times. The Arabic of the present day, copious as it has become in its derivative vocabulary, is as rigid in its Shemitic features as the oldest known Hebrew. There is some reason for regarding it as retaining even still more of the primitive type. The Greek was in its perfection in the days of Homer, and as Homer found it. It has never been surpassed since in all that makes the glory of language as a spiritual structure, in its classifications of outward things, in its still higher classification of ideas, in its precision and richness of epithet, in the profound presentation of moral and æsthetic distinctions,—in this respect ever in advance of the people who used it—in the elements it contained for the expression of philosophic thought whenever its stores should be required for that purpose, and, withall, in the melodiousness, the flexibility, and the exuberance of its vocal forms. The Thucydidian Greek falls below it in all these respects. Certainly it had not risen above it. It is the tendency of language, when left to itself, to decline in the attributes mentioned. The assertion may be hazarded that the evidence of this fact is exhibited in most modern tongues. More copious are they doubtless, better adapted to a quick political, social, or commercial intercourse, or to certain forms of civilization in which a greater community of action, or of understood conventional proceedings, makes up for the want of pictorial and dialectical clearness as inherent in the words themselves—but everywhere, in their old worn state, presenting a lack of that vividness, that exquisite shading of ideas, that power of emotion, which astonishes us in the early languages just mentioned. The tendency, in fact, is towards Sinism, or a language of loose arbitrary symbols, not away from it. As savagism is the dregs of a former higher civilization, so Sinism is the remains of language, bearing evidence of attrition and fracture; and this, however copious it may be, or however adapted it may be to a mere worldly civilization, such as that in which the Chinese have long been stationary, or slowly falling, and to which a godless culture, with all its science, is ever tending. There is in language accretion, addition, looseness, decay; but we rarely find, if we ever find, in any speech that has long been used, what may be truly called growth in the sense of organic vigor, or inward structural harmony. That young and vigorous constitution which is discovered in the earliest Arian and Shemitic speech, they must have received in some way for which it is very difficult to account on any natural or ordinary grounds. Convention will not explain it, as Plato saw long ago in the very dawn of philological inquiry; onomatopic theories fail altogether to account for the first words, to say nothing of grammatical forms; development is found to be mere cant, giving no real insight into the mystery. If the originating processes fall wholly within the sphere of the human, then must we suppose some instinctive logic, some sure intelligence working below consciousness, and somehow belonging to the race, or races, rather than to the individual. If this is difficult to conceive, or to understand, then there remains for us that which hardly surpasses it in wonder, whilst it falls short of it in mystery, namely, the idea of some ab extra supernatural power once operating on the human soul in its early youth—whether in the first creation, or in some subsequent early stages of remarkable development,—and now comparatively unknown.

When we study language on the map, the difficulty of any mere development theory bringing one of these families from the other, or from a common original stock, is greatly increased. Whilst the Arian and Shemitic present, in the main, certain geographical allotments tolerably distinct, this Hamitic or Turanian conglomerate is found dispersed in the most irregular manner. It is everywhere in spots throughout the regions occupied by the more organic families; sometimes in sporadic clusters, as in parts of Western Asia, sometimes driven far off to the confines as is the case with the Finnic and Lap language, or, again, wedged into corners, like the Basque language in Spain, lying between two branches of the Arian, the Roman and the Celtic.
Had we found rocks lying in such strange ways, it would at once have been said: no slow depositing, no long attrition, no gradual elevation or depression, has done all this. They may have exerted a modifying influence; but they are not alone sufficient to account for what appears. Here has been some eruptive or explosive force, some ab extra power, whether from above or beneath, sudden and extraordinary in its effect, however generated in its causality, and however we may style that causality, whether natural or supernatural, simply inexplicable, or divine. Such eruptive forces are not confined to rocks and strata, or to sudden changes in material organization. They have place also in the spiritual world, in the movements of history, in the souls of men, in remarkable changes and formations of language. There are spiritual phenomena, if the term may be used, for which we cannot otherwise easily account. The evidence here of any such intervening power may be less striking, because less startling to the sense, but to the calm and reverent reason they may be even more marked than anything analagous to them in the outer world of matter. Great confusion has arisen in our theological reasoning from confining this word miraculous solely to some supposed breakage or deflection in the natural sphere.

To say the least, therefore, it is not irrational to carry this view into the history of man regarded as under the influence of supernatural, as well as natural, agencies. And thus here, as we contemplate the remarkable position of the early languages of the world, and especially of the three great families, some force from without, sudden, eruptive, breaking up a previous movement, extraordinary to say the least, would be the causal idea suggested, even if the Scripture had said nothing about it. A primitive formation has been left comparatively but little affected; all around it, east and west, are linguistic appearances presenting the most striking contrasts to the first, and yet the most remarkable family likenesses to each other; elsewhere, as a third class of elements show, the eruptive or flooding force has broken everything into fragments, and scattered them far and wide. Philology cannot account for it; but when we study the tenth and eleventh of Genesis in what they fairly imply as well as clearly express, we have revealed to us an ancient causation adequate, alone adequate, we may say, to the singular effect produced. The language of the account is general, as in other parts of Scripture where a mighty change is to be described, universal in its direct and collateral historical effect, without requiring us to maintain an absolute universality in the incipient movement. From some such general terms in the commencement of chapter 11 it might seem, indeed, as though every man of the human race was in this plane of Shinar, and directly engaged in the impious undertaking described. Taking, however, the two Chapter s together—and it is too much to say, as most commentators do, in the very face of the arrangement, that the eleventh chapter is wholly prior to the tenth—we must conclude that one line, at least, of the sons of Shem, that of Arphaxad, the ancestor of the Chaldæans, and of Eber, the more direct progenitor of the Hebrews, remained in the upper country of the Euphrates. It is fairly to be inferred, too, that the Joktan migration to Arabia had commenced, carrying with it the Shemitic element of speech to modify or transform the Cushite, whether introduced before or after it. Some of the sons of Japheth may have already set off, west and east, in their long wanderings (to Greece and India perhaps), whilst Sidon, a descendant of Ham, had even at this early day, founded a maritime settlement, and ventured upon the seas. It is not easy to understand why the narration of the tenth chapter should have had its place before that of the eleventh, unless a portion, at least, of the movements there recorded, had been antecedent in time. It is commonly said that the tenth is anticipatory in respect to what follows, but this is not altogether satisfactory. As the story of the greater scattering comes after the ethnological divisions in the order of narration, it may be consistently maintained that it was subsequent to some of them, at least, in the order of time, whilst the seeming universality of the language may be explained on the ground of the magnitude of the later event, and its world-wide effect in the human history. A close examination, however, shows that, even in the diction, this universality is not so strict as some interpretations would make it. After these earlier departures, as we may supply from chapter 10, it proceeds to say, “the whole earth (land country) was (yet) of one language and one speech.” It had not been broken up, though it may have begun to be affected by causes which would naturally produce changes of dialect. “And in their journeying,” or “as they journeyed onward (מִקֶדֶם), they found a plain in the land of Shinar.” “As they journeyed,” that is, as men journeyed onward, or migrated more and more. Who or how many they were is not said, and these indefinite pronouns give us no right to say that every man of the human race, all of Noachian kind, were in this plain of Shinar. There is the strongest proof to the contrary. We cannot believe that Noah was there, although he lived three hundred and fifty years after the flood, or that Shem was there, who lived one hundred and fifty years later, and even in the days of Abraham. The idea is abhorrent that one so highly blessed of God, and in “whose tents” God had promised “to dwell”—Shem, the Name, the preserver of the holy speech, and the direct antithesis of that false “name” which these bold rebels sought to make unto themselves—should have had any participation, even by his presence, in so unholy a proceeding. As little can we believe it of any of the line from which came Abraham, or even of their not remote consanguinèi, the Joktanite Arabians. The same feeling arises when we think of the pious fathers of Melchizedek, king of Salem, king of righteousness, and who had consecrated him a priest to El Elion, that Most High God of the Heavens (see Genesis 14:18), who is here so blasphemously defied. Who were they, then, that composed this strange assemblage on the plain of Shinar? A vast multitude doubtless, a majority of Noah’s descendants perhaps, yet still, as is most likely, a colluvies gentium, a gathering of the bad, the bold, the adventurous, from every family, but with the Hamitic character decidedly predominant. Nimrodian, perhaps, might they be called with more propriety, if we take the constant Jewish tradition that Nimrod was their leader in rebellion. The nobler sons of Ham are to be distinguished from these Babylonian Hamites. The founder of the Egyptian monarchy, and, perhaps, the Arabian Cushites, had in all probability gone to their respective settlements. The very name, Nimrod, shows a difference between them. It is not the name of a country, or of a family of descendants, like the others mentioned Genesis 10:8; a fact of which Maimonides takes notice (see marg. note, p. 349) when he calls attention to the manner in which Nimrod is mentioned irregularly, as it were, or out of the line, after the other sons of Cush had been disposed of. He was not, like them, a “father of a people,” a patriarch, or ancestor, but a bold adventurer, a “mighty hunter of men before the Lord,” or in defiance of the Lord, who gathered together, out of every people, those who were like himself, not to settle the world, but to prevent its peaceful settlement by engaging in bold and reckless enterprises of an opposite nature. He may be said to have represented the empire-founding, instead of the planting or colonizing, tendency. He was the postdiluvian Cain, and there would seem to be a significance not to be disregarded in the fact that here there is given to this rebellious multitude that same name, בְּנֵי הָאָדָם, “sons of men,” which, in its feminine form, is used Genesis 6:4 (בְּנוֹת הָאָדָם) to denote the godless in distinction from the more pious. The line here indicated, between the sons of God and the “sons of men,” was less distinct, perhaps, than that which was drawn between the Sethites and the Cainites, yet it still existed to some extent, making a division between the better branches of the Shemites, with some from both the other lines, and this vast rabble of the sensual and ungodly. The grammatical form of the name Nimrod (which is very unusual for such a purpose) shows that it had a popular, instead of a family, origin. It is the first person plural future jussive, נִמְרֹד, “ come let us rebel.” It was the watchword of the impious leader, afterwards given to him as a title by his applauding followers: “Let us break Jehovah’s bands, let us cast his cords from us,” let us build a tower that shall reach Him in the Heavens.

On this impious host of Nimrod, predominantly, although not solely, Hamitic, fell especially the scattering and confounding blow, like the bolts from heaven aimed at the rebellious Titans; and hence this rabble of tongues called Hamitic or Turanian, or these allophylic conglomerates which philologists find so remarkable as compared with the enduring unity of the Shemitic, and the diversified, yet unmistakable Arian relationship. These two were, doubtless, affected by the shock; one of them may have had much of its subsequent modification, if not its origin, from it; but on the Hamitic host fell the stone that ground them to powder. “For there Jehovah confounded the language of all the earth” (land or country). This Nimrodian Babel of tongues wrought more or less of confusion everywhere, making the universality in the effect rather than in the immediate causality—a view perfectly consistent with the soberest interpretation of the artless language of Holy Scripture.

The causative influence, we may believe, was primarily a spiritual one. It was a confounding not only of their purposes (מַחְשְׁבוֹת לֵב, Genesis 6:5)—thus introducing confusion, madness, and discord, into their camp—but also of their ordinary thinkings and conceivings, τῶν ἐνθυμήσεων καὶ ἐννοιῶν καρδίας, Hebrews 4:12, “reaching to the dividing line of soul and spirit,” ψυχῆς τε καὶ πνεύματος, holding back the divine gift of reason, and thus introducing disorder into the sense and the utterance through a prior confusion in the spirit. It deranged their word-formations by a previous derangement of their thoughts.

The difficulty attending the mere outer view, here, arises from a fundamental error which may be found, even in acute treatises of philology. Words do not represent things, as outer existences merely, according to the common notion, but rather what we think about things. They are in truth symbols of our own inner world as affected by the outer world of things around us. They translate to us our own thoughts as well as help us to make them known to others. The animal has no such inner world, and therefore it is that he cannot use speech to represent it to himself or to other animals. This would be readily admitted in respect to words representative of thought alone; but it is true also of that large class that seem to stand directly for outward sensible things per se. Here, too, the word called the name represents only remotely the thing named, but nearly and primarily, some thinking, conceiving, or emotion, in our souls, connected with the thing, and giving rise to its name. As proper names are last of all, so these names of outward objects must have come after words denoting action or quality, and from which their own naming, unless supposed to be purely arbitrary, could alone have been derived. Originally they must have been all descriptive, that is, they had a meaning beyond their mere sign significance. In proportion as such primary meanings have faded out in modern languages, have words lost vividness and emotive power, though still remaining as a convenient classifying notation. Thus in early speech the names of animals, for example, were all descriptive. We find it so even now, as far as we can trace them in the significance of their roots. They invariably denote something which the animal does, or suffers, or is, or is supposed to do, to suffer, or to be—thus ever implying some judgment of the human mind respecting it; and tins corresponds to what is said in the Scripture of the animals being brought before Adam to see (לראות for Adam to see, judge, decide) what name should be given to each one. This name is ever taken from something more general, and the name of that from something more general still, and so back from the concrete to the more and more abstract, until we are lost in the mystery, and compelled to admit that there is something in ourselves, and in language, which it is not easy to understand. We may be sure, however, that in all these primary names of animals there was something descriptive, though in many it may have been long lost. In some cases it still shines dimly through the wear of time and usage, enabling us to infer it universally. Thus bird, we may be certain, means something more than bird, and dog than dog, even as fowl, fugel, vogel, still carries with it some faint image of flying, and chien, hund, κύων, canis (cano, canorus, קִינָה), suggests the clear, ringing, houndlike sound that denoted the animal in the earliest Arian speech. Connected with this there is another thought that has importance here. The first impression is that nouns, or the names of things, must be older in language than verbs. Examination, however, shows just the contrary as a fact, and then we see that it must be so, if names are not arbitrary, but ever imply some action or quality of the thing, and so an antecedent naming of that action or passion. But not to pursue this farther, it is enough to show that the spring of language is in the thought, the conceiving, the affection, as the source of names for things, and for the relations of things. Confusion here is confusion throughout, and this would be much more operative in a multitude thus affected than in an individual. Break up the community of thought and the community of language is broken up, or begins to break up along with it. It affects not only the matter but the form, the soul, the grammatical structure. Going still deeper, it changes the mode of lexical derivation, or the process through which secondary senses (as they exist in almost all abstract words) come from the primary—the inward etymologies, as they may be called, which are of more importance in determining the affinities of languages than the outward phonetic etymologies on which some philologists almost exclusively insist, and which are so easily lost—all the more easily and rapidly when the more spiritual bonds are loosed. So, on the other hand, the maintaining secure against mutation the higher ideas that dwell in a language, especially its religious ideas, is most conservative both of its matter and form. Thus may we account, in some degree, for the way in which the Shemitic endured the shock that left all around it those masses of fragments which philologists call the Hamitic or Turanian. The great name of God was in it in fulfilment of the promise. Those other remarkable appellations of Deity, El, Allah, Eloah, Elohim, Adonai, El Shaddai, El Elion, El Olam, παντοκράτωρ, ὕψιστος, ἀιώνιος, have been to it like a rock of ages, giving security to its other religious ideas, whilst these again have entered extensively into its proper names, its common nouns and verbs, conserving it against the corruption and degeneracy of those who spoke it, and giving even to its Arabic and Syriac branches a holy and religious aspect beyond anything presented in any ancient or modern tongue. Well and worthily have the Jewish Rabbis called it לשון הקודש, the holy tongue. Truly it is so, whether we regard it as the original Noachian speech, or something later preserved entire from the wreck of the Babel confusion.

How this extraordinary breaking up of language took place we may not easily know, though maintaining its possibility, and its strong probability, as a fact, aside from the express Scriptural declaration. There is no department of human inquiry in which we so soon come to the mysterious and inexplicable as in that of language. Some have maintained its onomatopic origin, as has been lately done in a very clear and able treatise by Prof. Whitney. If this, however, is confined to vocal resemblances in the names of sounds themselves, it accounts for only an exceedingly small number of words; if carried farther, to supposed analogies between the names of certain acts, or efforts, and the effort of the organs in pronouncing them, it takes in a very few more; beyond this it would be that idea of some inherent fitness in sounds which has been already considered in the note, p. 377, and to which the name onomatopic may be given in its widest sense; though then, instead of being the easiest, it would be the least explicable of all. So the philologist may endeavor to find the beginning of speech, especially in the names of animals, in the imitation of animal sounds; or he may absurdly trace it to a conventional naming, overlooking the truth that for the initiation of such a proceeding language itself is required—or he may deduce it from accident, or, give him time enough—and a past eternity is very long—he may fancy it coming out of inarticulate or merely interjectional sounds, making its random “natural selections,” until, after ages of chaos, a light inexplicable begins to gleam, an intelligence somehow enters into the process, and thus, at last, language comes into form, as a vehicle of rational, that is, of logical thought. But for human minds, λόγος, speech, and logos, reason, are one; and the serious thinker, who cannot separate them, takes but a few steps in this mysterious search before he is forced, either to acknowledge something superhuman, or to admit that in the birth and growth of language, the instrument of all reasoning, there must be some strange generic intelligence, if such a thing can be conceived, that we utterly fail to discover in the individual logic. In other words, men as a race, or races, do what the individual singly never does, something of which he is wholly unconscious, and which he cannot understand. The thought of divine intervention is the less strange; it presents the less difficulty, and is, therefore, the more rational. We are not to be unnecessarily introducing a divine agency into the world’s drama, but here, surely, it is a nodus vindice dignus, a knot which a divine intelligence can alone unbind. There is not in all nature anything like that spiritual mystery which meets us on the very threshold of an inquiry into the origin and development of human speech.

Leaving these more abstruse regions, and descending again to the clearer field of inductive observation, there still meet us those geographical difficulties to which some attention has already been given as inexplicable on any theory of gradual or mutual development. Allusion was before made to the appearances presented by those broken allophylic tongues to which has been given the common name Turanian—showing themselves among the other families, sometimes in contiguous beds, and then again as lying far away and far apart in space, even as they indicate a remote location in time. In such cases everything indicates the sudden projection of an early people, and of an early speech, entire. Succeeding waves of migration have pressed upon their shores, but changed no feature of their language. That seems to have had its form fixed in the beginning, and to defy mutation. Its isolated state, though surrounded by hostile elements, has only rendered it more unyielding in this respect. It will perish rather than change into anything else. There may be pointed out another geographical anomaly on a larger scale, and only explicable, too, on the ground of some early intervention to change the course of what might otherwise have been the ordinary historical development. A little less than a century ago, the learned began to perceive a striking resemblance between the Greek and the ancient language of India; a resemblance both in matter and form. They are both of the Arian or Indo-Germanic family, and yet we have no right to say that one has been derived from the other. From a period transcending all history they have been widely parted, territorially, from each other. They stood in the days of Alexander as distinctly separate as at any time before or after. In all the antecedent period there is no record or tradition of any colonizing on either side, of any military expedition, of any commercial or literary intercourse, that could have produced any assimilating effect. All this time, and for long after, there lay directly between them a territory and a people, or peoples, having nothing, socially or politically, in common with either, and speaking a language, of all others, the most directly foreign to both, or to any common language of which they both could be considered as branches. From Southern Arabia to Northern Syria, or the head waters of the Euphrates nearly, there was the continuous strip of the Shemitic, unbroken and unaffected during all that time. This, as has before been remarked, was, and is, the most tenacious and enduring of all linguistic families. It is still a wide living speech, although Greek and Sanscrit have both died, and been embalmed in their common and Sacred literature, and although this parting language, until comparatively modern times, had no literature except the scanty and most secluded Biblical writings. A branch of the Shemitic, if we may not rather call it the Shemitic itself, continuous and unchanged, is still living, strong and copious. Notwithstanding the addition of many new words, and many new senses that have attached themselves to the old, the Bedouin still talks in a manner that would have been recognized as familiar in the days of Abraham. Could we suppose the patriarch now listening to it, he would hear some strange words mingled with the great body of its earliest roots, and some few later forms, but in its pronouns, its prepositions, its tenses, its conjugations, its logical and rhetorical particles, in the nerves and sinews as well as in the bones of the language, it would strike him as substantially the same kind of talk that had passed between him and his sons Isaac and Ishmael. This most enduring ancient speech has suffered nothing that could be called development from anything on either side of it; and there has been no development across it from one parted shore to the other. Such theories as that of Bunsen, by which he gets Khamism out of Sinism, and Semism out of Khamism, and so on, would never explain this. The difficulty clears up somewhat if we bring in the extraordinary, and suppose some early supernatural cleaving and transformation, leaving one primitive type standing in its place, another, greatly changed, to be carried east and west by one people suddenly parted, and meeting again historically after ages of separation, whilst another type, broken into fragments, is dispersed far and wide to remote portions of the earth. This may be called cutting or breaking the knot, rather than untying, but even if the Bible had been silent, it is better than any hypothesis called natural, yet found to be wholly inadequate to explain the extraordinary phenomena to which it is applied. It is true, give a theorist time enough, and hypothetical conditions enough, and he may seem to develop almost anything out of anything else. Grant him enough of “natural selections,” and he may show us how to make worlds and languages by producing, at last, seeming congruities, falling into place after infinite incongruities. But then, such a method of proceeding, supposed to be inherent in the nature of things, cannot stop (if it goes right on without cycles) until it has abolished all things seemingly incongruous or extraordinary, and introduced a perfect level of congruity everywhere, in the physical, social, and philological world. Only take time enough, or rather suppose, as some do, a past eternity of such working, and the only conceivable result is a perfect sameness; all disorders must long since have been gone, all species must have become one, and that the highest or the lowest, all languages must have become one, and that the best or the poorest—something rising in its linguistic architecture far above the Greek and Sanscrit, or sinking in its looseness below anything called Turanian or Sinitic. The extraordinary, now and then, would be not only the easier conception, but an actual relief from the weariness of such a physical monotony.

But we have a more sure word of testimony. The great Bible-fact for the believer is, that, in order to prevent a very evil development of humanity, at a very early day, God interfered with men and confounded their language. There is nothing irrational in this if we believe in a God at all. The manner of doing it is not told us. What is said in Genesis 1:11 may not wholly explain the linguistic phenomena so early presented, and even now so remarkable; but it may be safely affirmed that far greater difficulties oppose themselves to any other solution that has been, or may yet be offered. T. L.]

Footnotes:

[10][Genesis 11:1. אַרְפַּכְשָׁד. Arphaxad,—pronunciation derived from the LXX., Αρφαξαδ; according to the Hebrew pointing, Arpakshad. It is a compound, evidently, of which the principal part is כשד, from which the later כשדים, Chaldæans. It would appear, on these accounts, to be the name of a people transferred to their ancestor, as in many other cases. Among the early nations names were not fixed, as they are with us in modern times. The birth name was changed for something else—some deed the man had done, or some land he had settled, and that becomes his appellation in history. Sometimes the early personal name is given to the country, and then comes back in a changed form as a designation of the ancestor. Thus Josephus speaks of the five primitive “Shemitic people, the Elamites (or Persians), the Assyrians, the Aramites (or Syrians), the Lydians (from Lud), and the Arphaxadites, now called Chaldæans.”—T. L.]

[11][Genesis 11:14. עֵבֶר. The line of Shem in Arphaxad seems to have remained along time after the flood in the upper country; and it may be doubted whether this branch of the Shemites, from whom Abraham was directly descended, were with the great multitude of the human race in the plain of Shinar, or had much, if any thing, to do with building the tower of Babel (see remarks of Lange, p. 367). Eber’s descendants came over the river, and began the first migrations to the south. The word עבר may mean over in respect to either side, and so it might be applied to one that went over, or to one that remained. This passing over being a memorable event, the naming would come very naturally from it, whether as given to the ancestor who stayed, or to the descendants who left the old country. Each side would be transeuphratensian to the other, and so truly עִבְרִים עִבְרִי, or Hebrews. It would be very much as we speak, or used to speak, of the old countries as transatlantic, on the other side of, or over the Atlantic; the Hebrew עבר having every appearance of being etymologically the same with the Greek ὑπέρ, German über, and our Saxon over. Compare Genesis 14:13, where אַבְרָם הָעִבְרִי, Abram the Hebrew, is rendered ’Αβρὰμ ὁ περάτης, Abram the passenger. T. L.]

[12][Genesis 11:20. שְׂרוּג). Some would resort to the primary sense of שרג or סרג to get the meaning entangled (verwickkelter), to make it correspond to some other derivations which are fancied here as denoting either the advance, or the retarding, of this early Shemitic movement. But besides the faintness and uncertainty of such derivations, the names they seem to indicate could only have been given long afterwards, when the facts on which they are supposed to be grounded had acquired a historical importance. Gesenius would render it palmes, a young vine-shoot (from שרג, to wind, twist). No name-giving could be more natural and easy than this. Compare שָׂרִוֹגִים, Genesis 40:10; Genesis 40:12; Joel 1:7; and what is said in the blessing of Joseph, Genesis 49:22, פֹּרָת יוֹסֵף בֵּן פֹּרָת, fruitfulness Joseph, son of fruitfulness—our translation, a very fruitful bough. T. L.]

[13][Genesis 11:29. יִסְכָּה, Iscah. The Jewish interpreters, generally, say that Iscah and Sarah were the same. Thus Rashi—“Iscah, that is, Sarah, so called because she was a seeress (סוכה) by the Holy Spirit, and because all gazed upon her beauty,” for which he refers to Genesis 12:14. The root סכה (see, gaze upon) is quite common in the Syriac, the oldest branch of the Shemitic, though it does not come in the Hebrew. It is revived, and becomes frequent, in the Rabbinical. It is equivalent to the Hebrew חוֹזֶה, Prophet or Seer. Aben Ezra has the same interpretation. T. L.]

[14][Thus the Shemitic greatly excels in the number of what are called its conjugations, or ways of modifying the primary sense of the verb. Otherwise its form may be characterized as the very grandeur of simplicity, suggesting the comparison of the majestic palm, whilst the Greek and Sanscrit may be likened to the branching oak. And so, again, in some of its aspects, the Shemitic presents a surprising bareness. In the Hebrew and Syriac, for example, there is the least show, or rather, only the rudimentary appearance of any optative or subjunctive modality, that is, in outward modal form, since all the subjective states may be clearly and effectively expressed by particles, or in some other way. It is the same, even now, in the Arabic, only that this embryotic appearance is a little more brought out. Three thousand years, and, within the last third of that time, a most copious use (philosophic, scientific, and commercial, as well as colloquial), have given it nothing, in this respect, that can be called structural growth, nothing that can be regarded as an approach to the exuberant forms of modality to be found in the Greek and Latin even in their earliest stages. It has kept to the mould in which it was first run. So also in the expression of time, the Shemitic still preserves its rigidness. It keeps its two tenses unmodified in form, though it has ways of denoting all varieties of time, relative or absolute, that any other language can express. Compare it with the Greek and Sanscrit copiousness of temporal forms; how early born are they, and how fruitful, in the one case, how unyielding, how stubbornly barren, we may say, in the other! Surely, one who carefully considers such phenomena as these, must admit that there is in the birth and perpetuity of language some other power—either as favoring or resisting—than that of mutual development, or reciprocal change, however long the periods that may be assumed for it as a convenience to certain theories. T. L.]

[15][This is said more especially in reference to the form, or what may be called the soul of each language respectively. Of the matter, or vocalized material, as it may be styled, there is a good deal that is common. There are many roots in the Arian that are evidently the same with the Shemitic, whether coming from a common original stock of sounds, or from a later borrowing from each other. Words pass from one language to another, or original vocal utterances are broken up, in an immense variety of ways; but the structural forms are unyielding. In this resides the characterizing principle of perpetuity; so that it is no paradox to affirm a generic identity in language, in which the greater part, or even all the articulated sounds had been changed, or have given place to others. When we consider the great facility of mere phonetic changes, through cognate letters or those of the same organ, through transition letters, by whose intervention there is a passage from one family into another (as i and y make a transition from the dentals to the gutturals, and w or v from the gutturals to the labials), or through nasal combinations, such as ng, nd, mb, which, on dissolution, may carry the syllable in the new direction of either element with all its affinities, thus making, as it were, a bridge between them—when we bear in mind how sounds wear out in the beginning or at the end of words, entirely disappearing, or easily admitting in their attenuated state the substitution of others belonging to a different organ, or how, in the middle of words, the compression of syllables bringing together harsh combinations, crushes out letters in some cases (especially if they be gutturals), or introduces a new element demanded by euphony—we cease to wonder at the great variety and extent of vocal changes. It is seen how in various ways any one letter almost, or syllabic sound, may pass into almost any other, and how the same word, as traced through its phonetic changes, presents an appearance in one language that neither the eye nor the ear would recognize in another. To take one example that may stand for an illustration of some of the most important of such changes, who, by the sight or sound alone, or by any outward marks, would recognize the Latin dies in the French jour, or the English tear (teaghr, δάκρυ) in the Latin lacr, lacrima, or the English head in the Latin caput and the Greek κεφαλή, though nothing can be more certain than their relationship as traced by the phonetic laws. The real wonder is that the changes in this department have not been greater than they are found to be. It is the soul of language, the unyielding rigidity of its form, that, by its association, prevents the utter dissolution and mutation of the material. Its conservatism, in this respect, is shown in, the case of languages that are merely spoken. It has its most complete effect in those that have a written and printed literature. T. L.]

[16][The arrangement, in the mind, of things to be named, belongs to the formation of language, as much as the naming, if it may not rather he said to be the most important part of the naming itself. Things, thus regarded, may be divided into three general classes: 1. Outward sensible objects; 2. actions, qualities, etc., as the ground of their naming, and themselves, therefore, demanding an antecedent naming; 3. mental acts and states, thoughts, thinkings, emotions, etc., regarded as wholly spiritual. In respect to the first, it may, indeed, be said that nature makes the classification, but the mind must recognize it, more or less correctly, before it can give the names. The second lies in both departments; since acts (doings, sufferings) must be the source whence direct names are drawn for the first, and figures, pictures, or spiritual representatives, for the third, as is shown in that large class of words that are said to have secondary meanings, or abstract ideas denoted by something material or sensible in the root. The third classification is wholly spiritual or within, though its namings are thus drawn from without. We find all this work done for us when we are born. The earliest languages have it as vividly as the latest, more vividly, we may say, if not carried to so wide an extent in the classification of outward objects, more profound, as analysis would show, in the distinctions of moral and æsthetical ideas. Whence came it? We must ascend to the very taproot of humanity to find an answer, if we are not to seek still farther in some divine teaching or inspiration. The phenomena lie ever before us; their commonness should not diminish our wonder at the mystery they present. T. L.]

[17][We may thank God that some of the noblest languages (Greek, Hebrew, Sanscrit, Latin) died long ago, or in their comparative youth. They have thus been embalmed, preserved from decay, made immortal, ever young,—their expressive words and forms still remaining as a reserve store for the highest philosophical, theological, and even scientific use. They are called “the dead languages;” but that which some would make an objection to what has long and justly been deemed their place in education, is the very ground of their excellence. T. L.]

[18][It is not extravagant to suppose something like this still lying at the ground of that mysterious process which we witness without wonder, because so common,—the rapid acquisition of language by the infant mind. It is not the mere learning to speak the names of outward, sensible, individual things—there is nothing much more strange in that than in teaching a parrot to talk,—but the quick seizing of those hidden relations of things, or rather of thought about things (ideas of the soul’s own with which it clothes things), and which it afterwards tasks all our outward logic to explain. How rapidly does this infant mind adapt words, not merely to chairs and tables, but to the relational notions of number, case, substance, attribute, qualifying degree, subjective modality, time relative and absolute, time as past, present, and future, or time as continuous and eventual, knowing nothing indeed of these as technical names, but grasping immediately the ideas, and seeing, with such amazing quickness, the adaptability to them of certain forms of expression, a mere termination, perhaps, or the faintest inflection, and that, too, with no outward imitative indices from the sense, such as may aid in the learning of the names of mere sensible objects. This indeed is wonderful, however common it may be. We never do it but once. All other acquisition of languages, in adult years, is by a process of memory, comparison, and conscious reasoning—in other words, a strictly scientific process, however certain abbreviations of it may be called the learning of a foreign tongue by “the method of nature” and of infancy. Something in the race analogous to this process in the individual infant soul, may be, not irrationally, supposed to have characterized the earliest human history of language. The failure of every system of artificial language, though attempted by the most philosophical minds, aided by the highest culture, shows that neither convention nor imitation had anything to do with its origin. T. L.]

[19][Thus Rashi interprets their הָבָה, “Go to, now let us climb the firmament and make war upon the most High.” Melchizedek and his forefathers were, in all probability, Canaanites. There might be piety and faith even among these, as is instanced, afterwards, and in a time of still greater corruption, in the case of Rahab, who was a direct ancestress of our Lord! What Paul says (Hebrews 7:3) of Melchizedek’s being ἀπάτωρ and ἀμήτωρ, “without father and without mother,” is not intended to deny his having any earthly lineage. T. L.]

[20][The opinion that the men in the plain of Shinar were not the whole human race, but predominantly Hamites, or followers of Nimrod, is maintained by Augustine, and, among modern authorities, by Luther and Calvin. See also the account of Josephus (“Ant.” i. 4). who makes Nimrod the great leader of the whole rebellious movement. T. L.]

[21][It was a thought exceedingly wicked, yet having in it a kind of terrific sublimity. Neither could the idea of reaching the heavens, or sky, be called irrational, or absurd, however unscientific. They reasoned inductively, Baconianly, we may say, from sense and observation. Their limited experience was not against it. It showed a vast ambition. It was not an undertaking of savages, but of men possessed with the idea of somehow getting above nature, and having much of that spirit which, even at the present day, characterizes some kinds of scientific boasting (see remarks, p. 355). It was not the success merely of the undertaking (from which we are yet as far as ever), but the impious thought, that God meant to confound, and to strike down, whenever it arose in the minds of men. History is full of overthrown Babels; and it is still to be tested whether our excessive modern boasting about what is going to be achieved by science, progress, and democracy, will form an exceptive case. T. L.]

[22][כִּי שָׁם; for there. It may denote fact or circumstance as well as place. For there—in that event, or in that confusion. Compare Psalms 133:3, where this particle, שָׁם, is used in just the same way to denote the opposite condition of brotherly love, and the opposite effect: כִּי שָׁם צִוֶּה יְהוָֹה, “ for there Jehovah commanded the blessing, even life forever more;” not in “Mount Hermon,” or “the mountains of Zion,” merely, but as belonging to this holy affection of brotherly love. Compare 1 John 3:14. T. L.]

[23] [For a notable example of this, see 2 Chronicles 20:23, where the hosts of Ammon, of Moab, and of Mount Seir, who rose up against Jehoshaphat, are suddenly turned against each other. Profane history records such events as taking place, now and then, in great armies; cases of sudden and irretrievable confusion, giving rise to hostility as well as flight. They are called panics, whether the term means simply universal disorder, or what was sometimes called “the wrath of Pan” (Πανὸς ὀργή, see Eurip. “Medea,” 1169), bringing madness upon an individual or a multitude; it denotes something inexplicable, even if we refuse to call it supernatural. See Polyænus: De Strateg., Genesis 1:1; also a very striking passage in the “Odyssey,” xx. 346, which shows, at all events, the common belief in such sudden madness falling upon multitudes of men, whatever may be the explanation of it:

μνηστῆρσι δὲ Παλλὰς ’Αθήνη

ἄσβεστον γέλω ὦρσε παρέπλαγξεν δὲ νόημα.

Among the suitors Pallas roused
Wild laughter irrepressible, and made
Their mind to wander far.
Even where there is nothing startling to the sense, how many examples are there—they can be cited even from very modern times—where the minds of assemblies, composed sometimes of those who claim to be most shrewd and intelligent, seem strangely confounded, and, without reason, and against all apparent motive, they do the very thing which is the destruction of all their schemes. They seem seized with a sudden fatuity, and act in a manner which is afterwards unaccountable to themselves. We may explain it as we will; but so strong is the conviction of an ab extra power somehow operating in such cases, that it has passed into one of the most common of proverbs, quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat—“those whom God would destroy, he first makes mad.”—T. L.]

[24] [The first thing denoted in outward language must have been something purely inward; a conscious state of soul, a thought or an emotion, which demanded an outward sign in some articulated sound representing it, not arbitrarily, nor accidentally, but by a conscious fitness for it, such as other sounds do not possess, and of which there can no more be given an explanation than of the correspondence between a thought, or an emotion, and an outward look. It is as real, and, at the same time, as inexplicable, as the harmony which is felt to have place between a feeling, or an idea, and a musical modulation. From the primary roots representing these most interior states, and which must be comparatively few in number, comes the next order of names, namely, those of qualities and actions of outward things regarded as affecting us. From these, in the third place, come the names of outward things themselves, as having such qualities or actions, and as denoted by them. Later, indeed, though still very early, there arise metaphorical words, or words derived from the second and third classes, with secondary tropical senses intended to represent mental states as pictured in some outward thing, scene, or act; but these do not belong to the prime elements of speech, which must begin with radical sounds supposed to represent something inward by a real or imagined fitness. That there is some such primary fitness seems to be assumed by some of the best philological writers, as by Kaulen in his Sprachverwirrung, and William Von Humboldt, in his work on the Kawi language, although they are unable to explain it. It is not likely that philology will ever penetrate the mystery. The great argument, however, for the reality of such a correspondence between articulated sound and thought, is, that, on the reverse theory, language is arbitrary throughout, which we cannot believe it to be. The denial brings more difficulty than the assumption, however inexplicable the latter may be.

On this deeper psychology of language we have a hint, it may be reverently said, in what is told us, 1 Corinthians 46:14., concerning the mysterious “gift of tongues.” It teaches us an important fact, though revealing nothing of its nature or mode. Although miraculous, it must be founded on something in the essential human spiritual constitution. There was a real language here. It is a profane trifling with a most sacred matter to treat it as a mere thaumaturgic babble, designed only to astonish or confound the unbelieving beholders. It was the true outward expression of an elevated inward state. The words uttered must have been not only articulate (that is, formod of vowels and consonants) but truly representative. They were none of them ἄφωνοι (Genesis 11:10), or mere φθογγοί, sounds, or noises. They had a real δύναμις τῆς φωνῆς (Genesis 11:11), a true “power of voice,” and this could be nothing else than an inherent fitness in the utterance to represent the entranced state, not generally, merely, but in its diversities of ecstatic idea or emotion. They were not understood by the hearers, because, in their ordinary state, there was nothing within them corresponding to it. Even the utterers could not translate it into the common logical language of the νοῦς (Genesis 11:14), or understanding. They were spoken ἐν πνεύματι, in the spirit, and only in the spirit could they be understood, like the words that Paul heard in his entranced state, “whether in the body, or out of the body, he could not tell.” Paul certainly does not mean to deny, or disparage, the greatness of the spiritual gift in what he says, Genesis 11:19, but only to set forth the greater outward usefulness of the prophetic charisma. “I thank God,” he says (Genesis 11:18) “I speak with tongues more than you all.” He was often in the state that demanded this language to express itself to itself. In respect to the connection of this peculiar case with the general argument, the analogy holds thus far, namely, that these ecstatic utterances were real representative words. They represented an inward spiritual state of thought, or emotion, or both, from a real inherent fitness to do so. We may, therefore, rationally conclude that a similar correspondence between words and ideas was at the beginning of all human speech. Had man remained spiritual, this connection would have continued as something intuitively perceived, and leading ever to a right application of articulate sounds to the things or acts signified, as it seems to have guided the first humanity in the naming of animals from some spiritual effect their appearance produced. This primitive gift or faculty of intuition became darkened by sin, sensuality, and earthliness turning the mind outward, and thus tending, more and more, to make words mere arbitrary signs. With all this, there is evidence that in the earliest speech of men there was more of vividness, more of a conscious living connection between words and that which they signified, than afterwards existed when languages became more copious and more mixed. In this way may we suppose that the early roots, though comparatively few in number, had more of a self-interpreting power, and that, in proportion as this continued, there was the greater security against the changes and diversities which a lower spiritual state must necessarily bring into language. A total loss of it among this rebellious Hamitic host may have led to a more rapid confounding of words and forms, and, of consequence, a greater ruin of language than ever came from any other event in human history. There are examples enough to show how soon the best language becomes a jargon in a community of very bad men, such as thieves and evil adventurers. Here was a similar case, as we may conceive it, only on a vastly larger scale. T. L.]

[25][The name given to an animal could never, of course, be a full description. It is the selection of some predominant trait, action, or habit, as the distinguishing or naming feature. This may vary among different people. In one tongue the same animal may be denoted by his color, if it has something peculiar, in another by his manner of movement, in another by a burrowing property, or by his method of seizing his prey. These different conceivings may give rise to different names; and yet if the actions so represented by these names have the same or similar verbal roots they may be indicative of a remoter unity. T. L.]

[26][If our modes of conceiving individual sensible objects have such an effect upon language, much more important, in this respect, are the more abstract conceptions, such as those of time, relative or absolute. The conserving power thus arising may receive an illustration from the scanty, yet most tenacious, Shemitic tenses, as compared with the Greek. In the Hebrew, time is conceived of as reckoned from a moving present, making all that comes after it, future, although it may be past to the absolute present of the narrator or describer, and all before it, past. It need not be said how much more of a subjective character this imparts to the language, especially in its poetry. It has had, besides, the effect of giving a peculiar form to the two tenses, and of making these, deficient as they may seem in number, denote all the varieties of time that are expressed in other languages, but in a more graphic manner. Whilst dispensing with an absolute present form, which would make it fixed and rigid, it has a flowing presence which may become absolute whenever the narration or description demands it. In the Indo-Germanic tongues, on the other hand, there is a fixed present and a fixed form for it, which will not allow a departure from the absolute time, except as sometimes implied in the assumption of a poetical style. Hence a much greater number of tense forms are demanded, not only for the past, present, and future, simply, but for a past and future to the past and future respectively, besides an indefinite or aorist form. Thus there is a wide machinery performing these offices—accurately, indeed, though with little more precision than is found in the Shemitic—whilst there is a loss of pictorial and dramatic power. There is no time, relative, or absolute, denoted by the Greek tense forms, that may not, in some way, be expressed in the Arabic; whilst the manner in which the latter shifts its present, as we may say, by hanging it on a particle, or making it depend upon its place before or after, gives a greater vividness of narration. It is astonishing how such scantiness of mode and tense escapes confusion and ambiguity; and yet there is a comparative test of this which is conclusive. The Arabic is written and read without anything like capital letters or italics, without any grammatical or logical punctuation, of any kind, making any division of paragraphs, sentences, or clauses. From the beginning of a book to the end, there are none of these helps to relieve deficiencies of expression, whether the result of carelessness, or coming from unavoidable looseness in the language. In English this could not be done. Without such outward helps, the most accurate writer, take he ever so much pains, would be full of grammatical constructions that might be taken in different ways, and not a few unsolvable logical ambiguities. T. L.]

[27][This is on the supposition that the Shemitic (for any difference here between the earliest Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, is of little consequence) was the primitive Noachian speech that came out of the ark. The best argument for it is that there is no good argument to the contrary. If no other has any better claim on inward philological grounds, the Bible history greatly favors the idea, to say the least, that this language of the ark continued the purest in the line of Shem. Kaulen, however, in his Sprachverwirrung zu Babel, presents a philological argument that certainly seems to have weight, though, in itself, it may not be deemed conclusive. He insists upon the fact that throughout this family, the most important modifications of the verbal idea are made by vowel changes in the root itself, and not merely by additions more or less loosely made to a fixed root, growing only by agglutination. Thus from one root, k-t-l (as written without vowels), we have katal, katel, kotel, katol, katul, kittel, kattel, kuttal, ktal, ktel, ktol, etc., all presenting distinct though varying ideas. The modification of the idea is in the root, not attached to it, as in the Indo-Germanic languages, by a modal or tense letter or syllable, taken from something without. The author connects this with a view he maintains, that the vowels, as distinct from the consonants, represent the more spiritual element in language. For the argument in its detail the reader is referred to the very able work above named, p. 73. T. L.]

[28][See the distinction that Plato makes in the Dialogue de Legibus, p. 895, D, between the thing, its spiritual word or λόγος (which is, in fact, the reason of the thing, or that which makes it what it is for the mind, its constituting idea), and the ὄνομα, the vocal name representative of the spiritual word itself. T. L.]

[29][This would especially be the case in respect to subjects falling into the Scriptural or Koranic style. In Reckendorf’s Hebrew translation of the Koran (Leip., 1857), there are, sometimes, whole verses in which the Arabic and Hebrew are almost wholly identical, both in the roots and in the forms. T. L.]