of the Euphrates; but it is perhaps premature to decide on this, until scholars have come to an agreement as to whether the primitive seat of all the Semites was in Arabia or Mesopotamia.

IV. What explanation can be given of the fact that the vernacular of the Jewish people changed after the captivity from Hebrew to Aramaic ?

Mr. Deutsch, in Smith's Bible Dictionary (vol. iii., p. 1638), gives the usual explanation of the gradual decay of the Hebrew vernacular in the fact that during the captivity in Babylon the Jewish exiles "enjoyed full liberty of intercommunication with the natives, and were utterly unrestrained in the exercise of every profession and trade,' and hence became quite "familiar with the Aramaic." Yet he does not seem to have been satisfied with this theory, for in the article on "Semitic Languages " in Kitto's Cyclopædia, he says that the captivity, even allowing for successive batches of immigrants from Babylonia, "does not quite account for the phenomenon of a seemingly poor and corrupt dialect supplanting so completely the other, hallowed by the most sacred traditions, that this became a dead language even in its own country." He then confesses that "the fact has not been sufficiently explained as yet." That is twenty-five years ago, and many things have been made clear since then. But there is one thing which was accessible to Mr. Deutsch which he failed to notice, and that is, that even when the Jewish exiles had been home for a century, they still spoke in the Jewish tongue; for in the days of Nehemiah (chap. xiii. 24) the inhabitants of Jerusalem ordinarily spoke Л. Clearly then they had not learned Aramaic in Babylonia; and the deciphering of the cuneiform inscriptions has shown that they had no facilities for doing so; for though Aramaic was spoken at court, yet the language of Babylonia was more like Hebrew than Aramaic, and very unlike both.

Further, we now know that it was on the soil of the Holy Land that the Jews learned Aramaic; for (1) the inscriptions of Petra have disclosed that the so-called Arabians (i.e. desert-rangers), of whom Geshem (or Gashmu) was chieftain, and who appear with the Samaritans in the very precincts of Jerusalem, first deriding and then opposing the efforts of Nehemiah to rebuild the city, were really Nabatheans, speaking the Aramaic language. Ewald, in his History of Israel, maintains that it was during the exile that the Nabatheans vanquished Edom, and began to establish themselves in the deserted cities of Judah. Thus the returned exiles were exposed to Aramaizing influences on the south. And (2) on the north it was equally so. We find in 2 Kings xvii. that the colonists sent to dwell in the depopulated towns of the northern tribes came from the towns of Babylonia and from Hamath. Now the Hamathites, though originally a Hamitic people, most probably spoke Aramaic. But besides this, the cuneiform inscriptions also narrate that the Sargon who dismantled Samaria sent the remnants of several conquered tribes of Northern Arabia into Samaria 3-tribes which were akin to the Temanites, and who with them had paid tribute to Tiglath-pileser II. But it has, as we have said, recently been discovered that the Temanites spoke Aramaic, and therefore we infer that the kindred tribes which were sent by Sargon "to the land of the house of Omri" also spoke Aramaic. In this way (along with the dominant influence of Syria during the Seleucid period) do we account for the historic fact that Samaria and Galilee came to speak Aramaic as the Thus the returned exiles were immigrants wedged between two Aramaan peoples; and consequently, first Judæa, and then Jerusalem, gradually succumbed: so

vernacular.

1 Compare Schrader's Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament, vol. i.,

p. 268.

2 Schrader, op. cit., p. 273.

gradually, that they retained the name ἡ Ἑβραῒς διάλεκτος for the speech of the Jewish people, even after they spoke Aramaic. That this is so is clear from the fact that, though every specimen of Semitic extant in the New Testament is Aramaic, yet 'Apaμaïorí never occurs, and the words Bethesda, Golgotha, and Gabbatha, all Aramaic forms, are all said to be 'Eẞpaïorí. Dr. Neubauer is of opinion that Jerusalem did not succumb to the Aramaizing influence, but that in the days of Christ the populace spoke a modernized Hebrew. His reasons are given at length in Studia Biblica, vol. i., p. 45 seq., and they certainly prove that new-Hebrew was spoken by the learned. But there is one fact which Dr. Neubauer has overlooked when he maintains that the popular dialect of Jerusalem was Hebrew; and that is, that the field in which Judas committed suicide was called (Acts i. 19) by the inhabitants of Jerusalem in their own tongue (τῇ ἰδίᾳ διαλέκτῳ) ̓Ακελδαμά. "field of blood "-the

חֲקַל דְמָא But this is Aramaic

Hebrew for "field" being ?. This seems to prove that even in the holy city the people spoke Aramaic.

V. In what language did the Saviour deliver His discourses? Is it probable that He was able to converse both in Aramaic and Greek?

This is a question of deep interest to every Christian, and the more one loves the Lord Jesus as a personal friend the more wishful will he be to know decisively. The all but unanimous testimony of scholars is that He spoke Aramaic. This was certainly the vernacular of Galilee, and the few Semitic words spoken by our Lord which are left embedded in the Greek of our present Gospels are all Aramaic. These are words which were felt to be too precious to be translated; and though they are few in number, they are amply sufficient to show that, even if the Saviour could speak Greek, yet Aramaic was the language of His home and of His heart. The names Boanerges

(Mark iii. 17) and Cephas (John i. 42), given to the three favourite disciples, are Aramaic. And when Jesus took the deaf and dumb man aside privately (Mark vii. 34), and "looked to heaven and sighed," the language of the sigh was an Aramaic word, n, which is, for euphony, transliterated eppalú. And when the Saviour stood over the lovely form of that child of twelve summers in the house of Jairus, and the heart of Jesus spoke in its native tongue to that which was innermost in the reviving child, He used the Aramaic words "Maiden, arise." In Gethsemane He used the precious word 'Aßßâ (NAN); and when, as the Mediator, He hung upon the cross, the words of despair which He uttered, linked as they are so essentially with the great vicarious purpose of His death, are left, as too precious to translate, in the very words in which they were spoken, No 8, Eli, Eli, lama shabaqtani? This is pure Aramaic. The word pay does not occur in Hebrew at all, but its import may be gathered from such passages in the Targums as these: Ruth i. 16, "Entreat me not to leave thee"; Psalm xxxvii. 25, "I have not seen the righteous forsaken"; ver. 28, "The Lord loveth judgment, He forsaketh not His saints." The fact that our Lord quoted Psalm xxii. 1 in Aramaic shows, that, even if we may not infer that the Targum had been committed to writing thus early, it was the Aramaic form of the psalm which had endeared itself to the Saviour's heart.

It is well known that there have been some few scholars who have maintained that Christ habitually spoke Greek. In the first series of this magazine there was an interesting controversy between Dr. Roberts and Dr. Sanday on the subject. Dr. Roberts must certainly be admitted, as the result of much research, to have brought to light many neglected facts to prove the prevalence of Greek in the Holy Land. He shows that the conquests of Alexander introduced a new leaven into oriental life. Greek supplanted

Aramaic as the one language of commerce, and as such was spoken by tradesmen and artisans; and many also among the nobles were fascinated by the new pleasures which Grecian civilization opened up for them, and adopted Greek names and Greek dress. To my mind, Dr. Roberts has proved "that Christ spoke Greek”—i.e. was familiar with the Greek tongue; indeed, I intend to bring forward a new line of reasoning which seems to prove that some of the sayings of our Lord are preserved to us in the very words in which they were spoken. One could wish one had been more successful in this search. It would be a pleasanter task to prove that all the sayings of Christ recorded in our Greek Gospels are "the ipsissima verba which proceeded out of His mouth," than to prove that those words have been lost; yet the stern logic of facts leaves us no other recourse than to admit that the discourses of the Saviour were, for the most part, delivered in the Aramaic vernacular-in the mother-tongue-the language in which love speaks to love and heart to heart. We intend however to prove also that the precious words were at a very early period committed to writing, and that each of the synoptists in his account of our Lord's discourses translated from this Aramaic document; and it is not a hopeless wish that in those passages which the three synoptists have in common, the Greek may be re-translated into the very words the Saviour used. What a gain this would be to sound scholarship, as well as to theology, we need not pause to describe.

VI. What evidence have we that the discourses of the Saviour were, in the first instance, written in Aramaic ?

The earliest testimony on this subject is to be found in a quotation from Papias given by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History. Papias was bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia in the earlier half of the first century, and he says that he learned from John the presbyter that "Matthew compiled