SIR,—With Lord Cecil I am not often able to agree.
But never has any better letter been written on a theological subject than his last to your issue for May 29th. I agree with every word of it on a subject that
I have tried to make my own after amassing the instances of recovered Akkadian-Sumerian, Old Egyptian and, above all, Assyrian words which
have been incorporated into the Hebrew consonants of the Old Testa- ment, late and early. Thus we have Elamite Persian introduced into Isaiah ; which, as Cheyne noted, practically demolishes the popular theory of a " double Isaiah," just as the early Ionian Greek in Daniel has actually demolished for ever the late date of that book. Both the Authorised and Revised Versions suffer from one serious flaw. In their time only Hebrew was known, and that in confusion with foreign words merely guessed at from the days of Ezra's revision to our own day. Ezra's day knew no Assyrian, and actually derived UR of the Chaldees from an Assyrian Uru ; it is the Hebrew abbreviation of the Assyrian Mugheir, which was always pronounced Um-queer ; hence the U and the R of " Ur "! Again, reem is the Hebrew for the Assyrian rimu and the later Arabic, rimi. It was mistaken by the ignorant Septuagint for a " rhinoceros " with one horn. Hence the Vulgate transmitted to our text the falk rendering of " unicorn." The word in Assyrian has come down to us with a picture of the animal, a huge two-horned antelope! And in all the three languages I have named the word still means and ever meant " antelope." At Gen. xli the seven cattle of the Nile fed on the ache, mistranslated by " meads." It is the modern Coptic and the original Egyptian of Tothmes III's time for the vetch that grows at the side of the Nile on its first rising and which aU kine loved. S too, Zaph-nathtpa-aneah, the Egyptian name given by Pharaoh to Joseph, does not mean what the Septuagint and English make it, but is actual Old Egyptian for " The Bread of Life " (zaf-nt-pa-anch). I am glad to cite the famous Egyptologists, Brugsch and now Yahuda, as agreeing with me in this. But a correct revised, up-to-date, euphonious, English ver- sion of our Bible, such as Lord Cecil demands, must have a fair start in a correct knowledge of not only Hebrew, but some nine incorporated Oriental languages with marvellously minute accuracy embodied in the Hebrew text in Hebrew letters. I have been in touch with nearly every Assyrian scholar in the world, especially Sayce and Langdon of Oxford and Pinches of London, sometimes admittedly correcting their views of
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