ger.—In ‘Blessed be the LorpD God of Shem’ (Gn 9°°), the designation of the whole (‘Shemites’) is put for that of the principal constituent of the race, namely Israel (cf. 10%). The ‘general ex- _ pression ‘the river’ stands for the Euphrates,
ecause for Western Asia this stream was ‘the great river’ (Gn 1518), ze. possessed most import- ance (3174 Hx 23°) Di 1124) oss 12 242taes Pas WOES Ie cise ee i Gln, Be be Cin alt Ezr 8°°, Neh 27-9, Ps 728 8012, Is 720 87 1115 195 2722, Jer 218, Mic 7, Zec 9). ‘The high’ kar’ é€oxyy is the heavens (2S 22", Job 16%, Ps 77 186 719 934 1447 1481, Is 2418-21 3015 335 406 5715, Mic 6°).—To this category belongs also the employment of the abstract for the concrete: as, for instance, ‘a help’ (Gn 2%); ‘captivity’? (2 K 245 257, 1 Ch 52, Ezr 14, Neh 7°, Est 28, Is 204451, Jer 245 284 2910. 22 40! 5231, Ezk 11 3321 401, Am 1% 9:15, Ob, Zec 61°), In Ps 110% ‘youth’ is employed in the same way as iwventus = iuvenes.
(6) Clearness of style can hardly be said to be prejudiced by the following devices.
It was natural that a single verb should express two cognate actions. Thus wv (Gn 3) is used for the hostile action both of the seed of the woman and of that of the serpent, and is thus equivalent in the one instance to ‘bruise’ and in the other to ‘sting.’ This employment of only one verb is known as Zeugma. Other examples of its use are: Ps 76? ‘There brake he the arrows, etc., and [fin- ished] the battle’; Ezk 6° ‘I am broken,’ ete. ; Hos 28 ‘J will break the bow, the sword, and the battle.’-—Elsewhere we meet with a play upon the double meaning of words. For instance, in Gn 487 paw has the two meanings of ‘mountain ridge’ and ‘portion.’ Further, Isaiah announces to his people, ‘Though thy multitude, O Israel, be as the sand of the sea, a remnant of them shall return ’ (104), ¢.e. ‘a remnant certainly, but only a remnant’ (Cheyne, 1884, ad loc.). Again, when Isaiah says to his people, ‘God will lift up his staff over thee’ [.e. for thy protection] ansp WW: (1074: 26>), he means by 475, in the first instance, ‘manner’ or ‘way.’ That is to say, God will help Israel in the way in which He helped them once before, when He brought them forth from Egypt. But, further, os) 7772 has in view the notion that God will deliver Israel by destroying the Assyrian army on the way to Egypt, as actually happened in B.C. 701 (Is 37%), ‘A phrase of double meaning, such as Isaiah loves,’ is Cheyne’s comment on Is 10°, He adduces no other example, but we find a similar ‘Janus-word’ in 22%: 24 where 725 is used in the two senses of ‘honour’ and ‘ weight.’ Both originated from the radical notion of the word, namely ‘heaviness.’ Again, one and the Same term 2¥ means both ‘turn away’ and ‘return’ (Jer 8). The other instances of this ambiguity will be found enumerated in Stilistik, p. 11f.—The striving after a witty use of words in a double sense culminates in the Riddle; and, in accordance with the general custom of Orientals of diverting themselves by putting and solving riddles, we find that the writers of Scripture have inter- woven a number of these with their histories and arguments. The earliest example is Jg 1414 ‘Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong [eater] came forth sweetness.’ Both the occurrences mentioned here are opposed to ordinary experience, and thus awaken reflexion. The answer to this riddle was in turn given (v.18) as a riddle, namely, ‘ What is sweeter than honey, and what is stronger than a lion?’ Once more, the words ‘The horse- leech hath two daughters, crying, Give, give. There are three things,’ etc. (Pr 30"), furnish a specimen of the enigmatic sayings which the Jews called n> ‘measure,’ because they lead to the measuring, 7.¢. exhausting of the scope of a notion.
STYLE OF SCRIPTURE
The other instances are Pr 616-19, Sir 2316 952. 7. 26°%- 19 50%, Also the name SHESHACH in Jer 2526 contains a species of riddle. The key to it is found in the custom of interchanging letters. In one of these systems the last letter of the alphabet was substituted for the first, the next to the last. for the second, and so on. In this way Sheshach (jw) would stand for Babel (513). The same phenomenon ‘presents itself in Jer 511, where the words ‘in the midst of them that rise up against me’ represent the Heb. Leb-kamai (np a5), which, on the same system of interchange of letters, would=Kasdim (o%%3), i.e. Chaldeans.