A

DISSERTATION

ON

THE LANGUAGE

OF

THE JEWS.

BY DAVID JENNINGS, D. D.

To the large account given of the Jews and their religion, chiefly from the sacred records of the Old Testament, I shall now subjoin a dissertation on the languages in which those records were written, namely, the Hebrew and the Chaldee. However, as only a small part of the latter writings are in Chaldee, our chief attention will be paid to the Hebrew. And here we shall consider,

1st, The antiquity of the language; and

2dly, The language itself.

1st, As to its antiquity: The Jews are very confident it was the first and original language, which, they say, was contrived by God himself, and which he inspired

Adam with a complete knowledge of. Accordingly those words, which we translate, " Man became a living soul," Gen. ii. 7. are rendered in the Chaldee Paraphrase of Jonathan, "The breath, breathed into him by God, became in man a speaking soul." And to the same purpose the Paraphrase of Onkelos. But notwithstanding the confident assertions of the Jews, there are other persons who have taken the liberty to doubt of this opinion, not only as to the high antiquity of the Hebrew language, but as to such a divine original of any language at all.

1st, As to the original of language itself. Though the Jews assert their language was taught to Adam by God himself, yet they are not all agreed how far the divine institution reached. Abarbanel supposes God instructed our first parents only in the roots and fundamental parts of the tongue, and left the further improvement to themselves; but others, that they received the whole extent and propriety of the language by immediate revelation. The same opinion hath been embraced by several Christians, particularly by Eunomius, who, because God is introduced by Moses as speaking before the creation of man, maintained that there was in words a certain eternal and immutable nature. But it is difficult to conceive, what connection there can be, for the most part, between sounds and things, except what is arbitrary, and fixed by consent or custom. And Gregory Nyssen exposes it as ridiculous and blasphemous to imagine, God would turn grammarian, and set him down subtilly to invent names for things. Dr. Shuckford conceives, that the original of our speaking was indeed from God; not that he put into Adam's mouth the very sounds which he designed he should use as the names of things; but only as he made him with the powers of a man, he had the use of an understanding to form notions in his mind of things about him, and he had power to utter sounds

which should be to himself the names of things, according as he might think fit to call them. These he might teach Eve, and in time both of them teach their children; and thus began and spread the first language of the world. Perhaps in this, as in many other disputes, the truth may lie betwixt the extremes. If our first parents had no extraordinary divine assistance in forming a language, it must have been a considerable time before they would have been able to converse freely together; which would have been a very great abatement of the pleasure of their paradisaical state. Nevertheless, as no doubt God formed them with excellent abilities, it may reasonably be supposed, he left them to exercise those abilities in perfecting a language upon the hints which he had given them.

But in whatever way the original language was formed,

2dly, In the dispute which was the original language, other nations have put in their claim, with as much assurance as the Jews. The Armenians allege, that as the ark rested in their country, Noah and his children must have remained there a considerable time, before the lower and marshy country of Chaldea could be fit to receive them; and it is therefore reasonable to suppose they left their language there, which was probably the very same that Adam spoke.

Some have fancied the Greek the most ancient tongue, because of its extent and copiousness.

The Teutonic, or that dialect of it which is spoken in the lower Germany and Brabant, hath found a strenuous patron in Geropius Becanus, who endeavours to derive even the Hebrew itself from that tongue.

The pretensions of the Chinese to this honour, have been allowed by several Europeans. The patrons of this opinion endeavour to support it, partly by the great antiquity of the Chinese, and their having preserved

themselves so many ages from any considerable mixture or intercourse with other nations. It is a notion advanced by Dr. Allix, and maintained by Mr. Whiston with his usual tenacity and fervour, that the Chinese are the posterity of Noah, by his children born after the flood, and that Fohi, the first king of China, was Noah.

It is further alleged in favour of the Chinese language, that consisting of few words, and those chiefly monosyllables, and having no variety of declensions, conjugations or grammatical rules, it carries strong marks of being the first and original language. Shuckford saith, it is so like a first uncultivated essay, that it is hard to conceive any other tongue to have been prior to it; and whether it was itself the original language or not, in respect to its consisting of monosyllables, the first language was no doubt similar to it. For it cannot be conceived, if men had at first known that plenty of expression which arises from polysyllables, any people or persons would have been so stupid, as to reduce their language to words of one syllable only.

As for those which are called the oriental languages, they have each their partisans; and of these the Hebrew and Syriac have most votes. The generality of eastern writers allow the preference to the Syriac, except the Jews, who assert the antiquity of the Hebrew with the greatest warmth; and with them several Christian writers agree; particularly, Chrysostom, Austin, Origen and Jerome among the ancients, and among the moderns Bochart, Heidegger, Selden, and Buxtorff. The chief argument to prove the Hebrew the original language, is taken from the names of persons mentioned before the confusion of Babel; which, they say, are plainly of the Hebrew derivation: As Adam, from Adamah, the ground, because God formed him out of the

earth: Eve or Havah, from hajah, vixit, because "she was the mother of all living:" Cain from kajah, acquisivit: Seth, from suth, posuit: Peleg from palag, divisit; and several others.

It is said these are plainly Hebrew names, and therefore prove the Hebrew language to have been in use when they were given. Besides it is alleged, the names of some nations are derived from Hebrew names: As Ionia, from Javan, the son of Japhat. And so likewise of some heathen gods; as Vulcan, which seems to be a corruption of Tubal-Cain; as Apollo does of Jubal. But Grotius and others will not allow this argument to be conclusive, and therefore reply,

1st, There are many more patriarchal names, of which we can find no such Hebrew derivation, than there are of which we can; and it might very likely happen, that among such a multitude of names, some few might answer to the word, which expressed the sense of that original word from whence the name was derived, in whatever language Moses had written. Thus, supposing he had written in Latin, and accordingly translated the name Adam into homo, it would have borne as near a relation to humus, the ground, as it does in Hebrew to Adamah.

2dly, We have no reason to conclude the names in the Mosaic history were the original names, and not translated by Moses into the language in which he wrote; since we have a plain instance of such a translation, in his own name; which, as it was given him by Pharaoh's daughter, an Egyptian, cannot be supposed to have been originally Hebrew; therefore, not Mosheh, as he wrote it, but as it is in the Coptic version Moüsi, from Mou, which in that language signifies water, and si, taken. But Moses, finding the Hebrew word mosheh, to "draw out," bearing some resemblance in sound to