with the perfection of his nature as to ascribe to him any other human passion or feeling.

6

ac

But to proceed to Mr. Bellamy's proof of error. Let it be remembered that in support of the received sense, there is the same concurrence of all authorities, ancient and modern, which we alleged in the former instance; that the Septuagint version, the Syriac, the Targum, the Samaritan, the Arabic, the Vulgate, besides every known commentator and interpreter, ancient and modern, are all in perfect agreement, all directly opposed to Mr. Bellamy. He makes an objection to the expressions 'it repented the Lord' it grieved him, of which no schoolboy of a tolerable understanding would have been guilty. There certainly is no word (he says) in the original for the neuter pronoun it; with regard to the expression, it grieved him,' a second error,' he adds, is made, viz. the introduction of the pronoun of the third person, him, for which there is no authority in the Hebrew.' He is so profoundly ignorant of the plainest forms of speech as not to know that the impersonal expression, it repented the Lord'' it grieved him,' is merely another mode of saying the Lord repented' he grieved or was grieved.' There are two words (he continues) in this verse which have been misunderstood and misapplied by the translators. The one, which, cording to him, never bears the sense of repent: the other arm, which does not bear that of grieve. In regard to the first he quietly allows that there occur, at least, sixty passages in the Bible in which the word is rendered in the sense of repent by our translators-he might have added, by all translators, ancient and modern; and we apprehend that this alone is conclusive as to its properly bearing this sense. But he spends much time in going through all these texts, and attempting to shew that, in each, the word comfort should be substituted for repent. We need not say that his Jabour is altogether unsuccessful, unless indeed the success he aims at be to discredit the Bible, by making it unintelligible. For instance, 1 Sam. xv. 29. The strength of Israel will not lie nor repent.' How absurd must it be to say-The strength of Israel will not lie nor be comforted? Or, Job xlii. 6. ‘I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes. I am comforted in dust and ashes'! Or, lastly, Jer. xviii. 8. If that nation-turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.'-' I will be comforted of, or concerning, the evil'? &c. The case will be precisely similar in almost every one of the texts in which he would substitute comfort instead of repent, as the sense of n. In fact his assertion that this word never bears the sense of repent, is contradicted by such proof, and such a mass of authority, that, even after all we have seen of Mr. Bellamy, we are really astonished at his having the hardihood to hazard it.

6

The

The second word, which Mr. Bellamy affirms to have been wholly misunderstood, is yn', usually translated' He grieved himself,' but which, as he maintains, signifies he idolized himself.? He might as well have assumed any other meaning. According to all the highest authorities, the root ay signifies simply to grieve in Hiphil, to cause to grieve, dolore afficere;' and in Hithpael, (the form in which it here occurs) 'to grieve within oneself,' dolore se afficere, dolere apud se,' as Simonis expresses it. , as a noun, in a sense derived from the former, signifies also an idol,' quia, as Castelli says, molestiam affert cultoribus; and thence the verb in Hiphil sometimes signifies to worship an idol;' but to give the word in Hithpael the sense of 'to idolize oneself,' (by which, we suppose, he means unduly to extol oneself,') is not only to oppose decidedly every known authority, but to claim a sense connected only in appearance with any of those which the root is allowed to bear. Mr. Bellamy, however, is a contemner of all ordinary authorities; we will therefore bring against him one which we know to be paramount with him; we mean, that of Mr. John Bellamy. The word * occurs in Hithpael only once in the Bible, besides in the passage before us, viz. at Gen. xxxiv. 7.; and there he translates it in the very sense which, in the present text, he rejects as improper. 'The sons of Jacob came from the field-and the men grieved themselves (an). Either Mr. Bellamy is right in rejecting the received sense of the word, or he is wrong. If right, why does he not reject it uniformly? If wrong, why does he reject it at all? What can be considered certain in language, if such arbitrary assumptions are allowed? and, above all, what is to be thought of a man who thus adopts in one page what he rejects as inadmissible in another? We have, perhaps, said enough of Mr. Bellamy's new discoveries respecting the meaning of Scripture. At the risk, however, of being tedious, we will advert, as briefly as we can, to another instance. It is a received part of scriptural history, Gen. xxii. 2. that the Almighty proved the faith and obedience of the patriarch Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice the child of his hopes; that the patriarch prepared to obey the divine command, and that, in consequence of his ready obedience, the great promise was made to him, that in his seed all the families of the earth should be blessed. Mr. Bellamy discovers that it is a grievous mistake to suppose that God commanded him to offer up his son, and affirms that this is one of the most unaccountable things in the sacred history, as it stands in the vulgar versions.' Is it possible, he asks, that the all-perfect Being would require Abraham to put his son to death in direct opposition to His own commands respecting human. sacrifice? The answer to this is obvious, that the Deity did not intend the command to be executed, and that His whole design was

to

to prove the faith and obedience of the patriarch, which proof could not be afforded better than by a command against which all his feelings most strongly revolted. In support, however, of this objection to the received sense, Mr. Bellamy contends that the words should be thus rendered, Take now thy son-to the land of Moriah and cause him to ascend there concerning the offering, upon one of the mountains which I shall mention to thee;' instead of the usual translation, ' Offer him up for a burnt offering,' &c.

Now, let us consider with what palpable inconsistencies this new interpretation invests the whole narration. It is first stated (v. 1.) that God tempted or proved Abraham, which manifestly implies that some signal trial of his obedience was to follow; then, according to Mr. Bellamy, there merely ensues a command of the plainest kind, and one which involves no trial, viz. to go with his son, and offer sacrifice on a particular mountain. Abraham, however, contrary to the divine command, (still according to Mr. Bellamy's interpretation,) prepares to sacrifice Isaac; the Deity approves of his conduct in so doing, and says because thou hast not withheld thine only son, surely blessing I will bless thee,' &c. The mere comparison of such a mass of absurdity with the plain narrative of the received versions, must convince every reader that the one cannot but be right, the other wrong.

לעלה

6

To come, however, to the words themselves brownym. The root by signifies generally to ascend.' Hence by a burnt offering' from the ascent of the smoke, and лby „byn' to cause to ascend (or to offer) for a burnt-offering.' But, says Mr. Bellamy, means concerning a burnt-offering.' To this we answer that to give the preposition the sense of concerning' is very unusual, if at all admissible; and that every allowed principle of interpretation requires that words in plain passages should be taken in their ordinary sense. We answer further that we can produce a competent authority,-no less, in fact, than his own, to convince him that the received translation is right. For, in the same chapter, the very same words occur; and how does he translate them? not according to his new discovery, but exactly as they have always been rendered by others, and as they are rendered in our received version. Abraham found a ram fastened in a thicket by the horus, and, as Mr. Bellamy translates,' he went and took the ram (¬ b) and offered him for a burnt offering instead of his son.' We have thus another unequivocal proof that Mr. Bellamy does not himself believe what he asserts respecting the error of the received translation; for, within the space of eleven verses, he adopts that as right, which he had before condemned as wrong.

It is unnecessary to trouble the reader with further details. shall only add therefore that, in every instance where Mr. Bellamy

We

has

has pretended to discover a sense of plain historical passages unknown to former translators, the effrontery of his attempt is fully equalled by the ignorance, inconsistency and incapacity which he displays in carrying it into effect.

We now proceed to take a short view of his success in clothing the meaning of the original in au English dress, in those parts where he allows the sense to be the same as has been always understood. His pretension, we have seen, is to give a close translation of the Hebrew: the consequence is that, while he uses English words, he makes no accommodation whatever to English idiom; and has, therefore, for the most part, produced strings of words, which scarcely deserve to be called English sentences. He has had predecessors in this way; among others, Henry Ainsworth, who, about the year 1639, published a version of the five books of Moses, the Psalms, &c. on a plan which he calls making Scripture its own interpreter, where, professing to render the Hebrew into English, word for word, he produces a version of so harsh and uncouth a description, that Lewis, in his history of English Translations, (p. 353.) after giving a specimen, asks whether it can be believed that Ainsworth was an Englishman and understood his own language! The case is precisely the same with Mr. Bellamy.

Gen. ii. 3, 4, 5. Therefore God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it; because, before it, he ceased from all his work; for God ereated, to generate. These are the generations of the heaven and the earth, when he created them on the day Jehovah finished, earth and heaven. Even every plant of the field, before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew for Jehovah God had not caused rain on the earth; moreover, nor a man, to till the ground.' Gen. ii. 23, 24. And the man said; Thus this time, bone after my bone; also flesh after my flesh; for this he shall call woman; because she was received by the man. Therefore a man will leave, even his father, and his mother: for he will unite with his wife; and they shall be, for one flesh.'

In such passages as these (and we could produce them from every page) it would be often impossible for the English reader to comprehend the meaning of the original, unless he had the authorized version at hand to interpret that of Mr. Bellamy. How infinitely inferior is a translation of this hard and dry nature, to that in use, where there is such an accommodation to the native idiom as to make the language easy and intelligible, and yet no essential departure from the original! But, independently of the general uncouthness of this absurd attempt to preserve the Hebrew idiom, Mr. Bellamy's translation abounds with inconsistencies, improprieties, and alterations of the words of the authorized version manifestly for the worse. We will produce a few passages from the first chapter of Genesis, as specimens of the whole.

VOL. XIX. NO. XXXVII.

S

V. 1. In

V. 1. In the beginning God created the substance of the heaven and the substance of the earth.' The substance of" Mr. Bellamy conceives, he says, to be the meaning of the word ns which precedes' and 787, the heavens and the earth.' Now it is the opinion of Hebraists of the first authority that ns preceding a noun, after an active verb, is merely the mark of the accusative case. It is true that Parkhurst considers ns to mean the very substance of a thing,' the,'' the very;' but, allowing him to be right, the proper translation would be the very heaven and the very earth,' ipsum coelum et ipsam terram; not the substance of the heaven and the earth,' an expression, from which would naturally be understood, not that the heaven and earth were created, but that the substance was created from which the heaven and the earth were afterwards formed. But let it be granted that Mr. Bellamy is right in his translation of this passage. We conceive no position will be more generally allowed than that the same word, when similarly applied in different passages, should be rendered in the same sense. Now what is the fact? The word, ns, occurs similarly applied in this very chapter more than a dozen times; and in no one instance, excepting this of v. 1. does he translate it the substance of,' or give it any peculiar force. Thus at v. 4. he does not say 'God saw that the substance of the light was good,' but God saw that the light was good.' At v. 7. God made the expanse; at v. 16. God made the two great lights,' &c. Mr. Bellamy must either be right in the sense he contends for of the word ns, or he must be wrong. If wrong, why does he express it at v. 1.? If right, why does he omit to express it in all the other passages?

6

V. 3. Then God said, Be light." Mr. Bellamy finds fault with the expression of the received translation, Let there be light,' because, there is no authority for the word 'let' in the original, and because, as implying permission, it is not applicable to the Creator. We have seldom met with a remark founded on more consummate ignorance. He does not seem to know that the word let' is auxiliary in the form of the third person imperative in English, and that Be it' and let it be' are forms of expression perfectly synouimous, permission being no more implied in the one than in the other.

6

V. 5. So the evening and the morning were the first day.' The literal translation of the Hebrew is, The evening was, and the morning was, the first day.' As he professes to translate with extreme closeness, why has he deserted his principle here? V. 6. Be there a division between the waters, &c.' The word which he translates a division' is 720, which is manifestly the participle benoui in Hiphil from 72 to divide; and the literal

rendering