VOL. XVI. 25
SS6 INTEGRITY AND PURITY OF THE HEBREW AND GREEK TEXT.
It is not my design to give in arguments for the divine original of the present Hebrew pmictuation; neither do I judge it necessary for any one so to do whilst the learned Buxtorfius' discourse, " De Origine et Antiquitate Punctoruni," lies unanswered. I shall, there- fore, only add one or two considerations which to me are of weight, and not, as I remember, mentioned by him or his father in his *' Tiberias," or any other that I know of in their disputes to this purpose.
1. If the points or vowels, and accents, be coevous with the rest of the letters, or have an original before all grammar of that lan- guage (as, indeed, languages are not made by grammar, but gram- mars are made by languages), then the grammar of it and them must he collected from the observation of their use, as they were found in all their variety, before any such art was invented or used ; and rules must be suited thereunto. The drawing into rules all the instances that, being uniform, would fall under such rules, and the distinct observation of anomalous words, either singly, or in excep- tions comprehending many under one head that would not be so reduced, was the work of grammar. But, on the other side, if the vowels and accents were invented by themselves, and added to the letters, then the rule and art of disposing, transposing, and changing of them, must he constituted and fixed hefore the disposition of them; for they were placed after the rules made, and according to them. A middle way, that I know of, cannot be fixed on. Either they are of the original writing of the language, and have had rules made by their station therein, or they have been supplied unto it according to rules of art. Things are not thus come to pass by chance ; nor was this world created by a casual concurrence of these atoms. Now, if the grammar or art was the ground and foundation, not the product of their use, as I am confident I shall never see a tolerable answer given to that inquiry of Buxtorfius the eider in his " Tiberias," why the inventors of them left so many words anomalous and pointed otherwise than according to rule or the constant course of the lan- guage, precisely reckoning them up when they had so done, and how often they are so used, as .. and ., for „, and _ for ^,and the like, when they might, if they had so pleased, have made them all regular, to their own great ease, advantage of their language, and facilitating the learning of it to all posterity, the thing they seem to have aimed at : so I cannot be satisfied why, in that long, operose, and curious work of the Masoretes, wherein they have reckoned up every word in the Scripture, and have observed the irregularity of every letter and tittle, they never once attempt to give us out those catholic rules whereby they or their masters proceeded in af- fixing the points ; or whence it came to pass that no learned Jew for
ORIGIN OF THE HEBREW POINTS. 387
hundreds of years after should be able to acquaint us with that way, but in all their grammatical instructions should merely collect obser- vations, and inculcate them a hundred times over, according as they present themselves to them by particular instances. Assuredly, had this wonderful art of pointing, which for the most part may be re- duced to catholic rules, and might have wholly been so if it were an arbitrary invention, limited to no pre-existing writing, been found out first and established as the norma and canon of affixing the vowels, some footsteps of it would have remained in the Masora, or among some of the Jews, who spent all their time and days in the consideration of it.
2. In the days of the Chaldee paraphrast, when the prophecies of the humiliation and death of their Messiah were only not under- stood by them, yet lue see into how many several ways and senses they are ivrested by that paraphrast, to affix some tolerable meaning to them. Take an instance on Isa. liii. Jonathan there acknow- ledges the whole prophecy to be intended of Christ, as knowing it to be the common faith of the church; but not understanding the state of humiUation which the Messiah was to undergo, he wrests the words into all forms, to make that which is spoken passively of Christ, as to his suffering from others, to signify actively, as to his doing and exercising judgment upon others ! But now, more than five hundred years after, when these points are supposed to be in- vented, when the Rabbins were awake and knew full well what use was made of those places against them, as also that the prophets (especially Isaiah) are the most obscure part of the whole Scripture, as to the grammatical sense of their words in their coherence, without points and accents, and how facile it were to invert the whole sense of many periods by small alterations in these rules of reading, yet as they are pointed they make out incomparably more clearly the Christian faith than any ancient translations of those places what- ever. Johannes Isaac, a converted Jew, lib. i. ad Lindan., tells us that above two hundred testimonies about Christ may be brought out of the original Hebrew that appear not in the Vulgar Latin or any other translation. And Raymundus Martinus, " Noverint quae ejusmodi sunt " (that is, who blamed him for translating things im- mediately out of the Hebrew, not following the Vulgar Latin) " in plurimis valde sacrse Scripturse locis veritatem multo planius atque perfectius pro fide Christiana haberi in litera Hebraica quam in translatione nostra," Prooem. ad Pug. Fid. sec. 14, Let any man consider those two racks of the Rabbins and swords of Judaical un- belief, Isa. liii, and Dan, ix,, as they are now pointed and accented in our Bibles, and compare them with the translation of the LXX., and this will quickly appear unto him. Especially hath this been i