are duly timid of expressing dissent from any of his

conclusions or statements. As it happens, however, that we shall have to do so more than once, we shall postpone criticism to eulogy. For although this work is, as the writer says in his preface, " almost entirely tentative in its character," it challenges

eulogy of the warmest kind. We shell simply say, therefore, that in its present shape, it is a work that every serious student of Biblical Greek may regard as indispensable, and we shall express a conviction that it will prove the precursor of much

to follow from the author himself, or from disciples who will work the mine which he has here so successfully opened. A sample or two of his workmanship will show that we have cause for this conviction more convincingly than any words of OUT own :—

" The difficulty of Biblical Greek really begins when we re- member that it was Greek as spoken not merely in a foreign country and under new circumstances, but also by an alien race. The disputed question of the extent to which it was spoken does

• Essays in Biblical Greek. By Edwin Hatch, M.A., D.D., Reader in Eoelesias- tieal History, Oxford. Oxford : Clarendon Press. 1889.

not affect the literary monuments with which we have to deal. Whether those monuments appealed immediately to a narrower or to a wider circle of readers, they undoubtedly reflect current usage. They afford clear internal evidence that their writers, in most cases, were men whose thoughts were cast in a Semitic and not in a Hellenic mould. They were not only foreigners talking a language which was not their own, as an Englishman talks French ; they were also men of one race speaking the language of another, as a Hindoo Mussulman talks English. This affected the language chiefly in that the race who thus spoke it had a different inheritance of religious and moral ideas from the race to which it properly belonged. The conceptions of God and goodness, the religious sanction and the moral ideal, were very different in men whose traditions came down from Moses and the prophets, from what they had been in men whose gods lived upon Olympus, and whose Pentateuch was the Iliad. The attitude of such men towards human life, towards Nature, and towards God was so different, that though Greek words were used, they were the symbols of quite other than Greek ideas. For every race has its own mass and combination of ideas ; and when one race adopts the language of another, it cannot from the very nature of the human mind adopt with it the ideas of which that language is the expression. It takes the words, but it cannot take their connotation : and it has ideas of its own for which it only finds in foreign phrases a rough and partial covering."

This passage serves as a key-note to the whole of these essays,

but more than ha If of Dr. Hatch's volume lends itself only to the minute criticism which is fitted for journals that are purely philological. We cannot here if we would, and we would not if

we could, express dissent from any of the conclusions which the author has reached with regard to the source from which the well-known " composite quotations in the New Testament " are drawn. Still less should we like to meddle with his views of " Origen's Revision of the Septuagint Text of Job," or with his final essay, " On the Text of Ecclesiasticus." But a few words,!submissively and hesitatingly, we must say about his essay on " Psychological Terms in Biblical Greek." The conclusions which he reaches are incontestable. The Synoptic Gospels, in their usage of these terms, are closely allied with the Septuagint. And it is equally certain that the usage of St. Paul differs considerably, if not entirely, from that of Philo. But Dr. Hatch's treatment of Philo himself seems open to the criticism that he ignores, for we should not like to say more, the labours which a host of scholars have spent upon the so-called works of that piebald philosopher.

But the most interesting and valuable essay in this book is one that is open to criticism of a kind that it would be unfair to characterise as " minute." This is the second essay, headed " Short Studies of the Meaning of Words in Biblical Greek." These admirable studies will remind old scholars of Buttmann's

admirable Lexilogus, and before we venture to criticise a few of them, we have a lance to break with the writer. He is of opinion, and it is strange if he, of all men in England,

should be wrong in being of that opinion, that the language of the New Testament has not yet attracted the special attention of any considerable scholars. " There is no good

lexicon," he Bays. Why, in the face of Thayer-Grimm's he might as fairly say that there was no good lexicon to ,Eschylus.

" There is [no philological commentary," seems to be far too strong an assertion. And a flat contradiction is what we cannot even apologise for making to Dr. Hatch's positive assertion that "there is no adequate grammar." Here, however, the reflection that Dr. Hatch must know far better than ourselves all the shortcomings which must be apparent to him in works which we have always regarded as sufficient for their purpose, "gives us pause." But the question is one which we may be forgiven for raising, and we turn from it willingly to note the core of Dr. Hatch's system. He argues very acutely that that which gives the Septuagint a value for Biblical philology, " is the fact that it is a translation of a book of which we possess the original. For the meaning of the great majority of its words and phrases, we are not left solely to the inferences which may be made by comparing one passage with another in either the Septuagint itself or other monuments of Hellenistic Greek. We can refer to the passages of which they are translations, and in most cases frame in- ductions as to their meaning which are as certain as any philological inductions can be. It is a true paradox that while historically as well as philologically the Greek is a translation of the Hebrew, philologically, though not historically, the Hebrew may be regarded as a translation of the Greek. This apparent paradox may be illustrated by the analogous case of the Gothic translation of the Gospels : historically as well as philologically that translation is, as it professes to be, a ren- dering of the Greek into the Mceso-Gothic of the fourth century A.D.; but since all other monuments of the Mceso- Gothic have perished, the Greek of the Gospels becomes for philological purposes—that is to say, for the understanding of Mceso-Gothic words—a key to, or translation of the Gothic."

Bearing these views in mind, and giving full consideration to all the warnings which Dr. Hatch has addressed to scholars who think that if they can translate Thucydides at sight, they can make short work with the New Testament, we shall now briefly notice one or two of his " studies." The one undoubtedly

which will attract most attention, but will not command assent from the majority of readers, is that in which the author deals with 7rapxo fzOc. His view, if correct, will introduce a new reading into the Lord's Prayer, and will essentially modify one of the cardinal points of Messianic theology. The mode, he argues, in which God tried or proved men was almost always that of sending them some affliction or disaster ; and con- sequently, " trial " (as not unfrequently in English) came to

connote affliction and disaster. This is true, and we have little

doubt that the meaning of the much-debated words Iasi sierevi'vxn; x. T. A. is simply equivalent to a prayer for de- liverance from d xevnpO; or TO iropxpew,—i.e., from the enemy,

or from that which works us harm. But the inference that " temptation " should be discarded for " trial " is an inference which we are unable to draw. We are unable, too, though

Dr. Hatch here has numbers on his side, to assent to the translation of elpErai by "praises." This, however, is a point of no consequence.

Dr. Sanday has expressed his dissatisfaction with " supersti- tious " as a rendering for aEearaaipewv, but he offers no alternative word. Yet an English scholar can hardly fail to feel that a

man may be " superstitious " with regard to Fridays, thirteen,

&c., and yet not be EICf3a11

little doubt," he says, " that the word must be invariably taken in the sense of ' covenant,' and especially in a book which is so impregnated with the language of the Septuagint as the Epistle to the Hebrews." A glance, however, at the well- known words in the ninth chapter of that Epistle will make

most readers think that Dr. Hatch has permitted himself, for once in a way, to ride his hobby too hard. Very different is the way in which he rides it to show that " firm foundation " or " firm footing " is a better rendering than " preparation " for iroil4ceoict in Ephesians vi., 15. A perusal of his remarks on puerriploy will convince any reader who is a student of Biblical Greek, that for him at least this admirable volume is an in- dispensable vade meewm. Speaking from a philological point of view, we should venture to say of it what Coleridge said of Selden's Table Talk. But it would b3 unjust not to notice that Dr. Hatch's philological views are brightened by flashes of insight and wisdom which it would be sheer impertinence on our part to praise. We shall conclude this notice with one of these, selected from his interesting study of wrong:- " Philo," he says, "sometimes uses this word in its rhetorical sense of `proof' or evidence.' But he more commonly uses it in a sense in which the intellectual state of mind which is called `conviction' is blended with the moral state of mind which is called trust.' It is transferred alike from the conviction which results from sensible perception and from that which results from reasoning, to that which is based on a conception of the nature of God. The mass of men trust their senses or their reason : in a similar way the good man trusts God. Just as the former believe that their senses and their reason do not deceive them, so the latter believes that God does not deceive him ; and the conviction of thel.atter has a firmer ground than that of the former, inasmuch as both the senses and the reason do deceive men, whereas God never deceives."