from his banners, until the Pacific shall come." Latin Vulgate, "Tlie sceptre shall not be taken away from Judali, nor a leader from his thigh — donee vcniet qui mittendus est, until he shall come who is to be sent." This is supposed to be founded upon mistaking in the original nb^'iU for Plb'^"^, which latter coines from the root np"»r, signifying to send; yet it is adopted by some scholars as the truest reading, the present form of the word being owing, in their opinion, to the error of tran- scribers in substituting n for PI.
2. Various other etymologies have been assigned to the term, the advocates of which may be divided into two classes — those who consider the word JlP'^UJ as a compound, and those who deem it a radical or simple derivation.
(a.) Those of the first class coincide, (1) for the most part, with the ancient interpreters, taking nb'^'iU as equivalent to "k'dl, and this to be made up of IT, the con- traction of "I'i'X, who, and lb, the dative of the third personal pronoun. The rendering, accordingly, in this case, would be cujus est, or ciii est, whose it is, to ichom it belongs, i. e. the sceptre or dominion. This interpreta- tion is defended by Jahn {Einl. in d. A.T.'i. 507, and Vat. Mes. ii, 179J. It is approved also by Hess, De Wette, Krummacher, and others, including Turner {Companion to Genesis, ad loc). The authority of the ancient ver- sions, already alluded to, is the principal ground upon which its advocates rely. But to this sense it is a seri- ous objection that there is no evidence that the abbre- viation of 1UJX into ly was known in the time of Moses. There is no other instance of it in the Pentateuch, and it is only in the book of Judges that we first meet with it. However the rendering of the old translators may be accounted for, there is no sufficient ground for the belief that the form in question was the received one in their time. If it were, we should doubtless find some traces of it in existing manuscripts. But though these copies exhibit the reading ib^'r. not one of them gives "{b'ZJ, and but very few nb'i\ which Hengstenberg deems of no consequence, as the omission of the Yod was merely a defective way of writing, \vhich often occurs in words of similar structure. An argument for this interpreta- tion has, indeed, been derived from Ezek. xxi, 27, where the words " until he shall come whose is the dominion," ua'U^il lb "TUX, are regarded as an obvious para- phrase of ib'JlJ or nblU. But to this it may be an- swered that while Ezekiel may have had the present passage in his eye, and intended an allusion to the char- acter or prerogatives of the Messiah, yet there is no evidence that this was designed as an interpretation of the name under consideration. The reasons, therefore, appear ample for setting aside, as wholh' untenable, the explication of the time here propounded, without ad- verting to the fact that the ellipsis involved in this construction is so unnatural and violent that no parallel to it can be found in the whole Scriptures.
(2.) Another solution proposed by some expositors is, to derive the word nb"''>:3 from b"^©, child, and the suffix n for 1. This will yield the reading " until his ( Judah's) son or descendant, the Jlessiah, shall come." Thus the Targ. Jon., " Until the time when the king's Messiah shall come, the little one of his sons." This view is favored by Calvin (ad loc.) and by Knapp {Dogm. ii, 138), and also by Dathe. There is, however, no such word in known Hebrew, and as a plea for its possible existence reference is made to an Arabic word, shulil, with the same signification. The only philological de- fence is (with Luther) to resolve flb'^ll; into a synonym with IT^b^J, after-birth (Deut. xxviii, 57), rendered "young one;" but this requires us to adopt the unnat- ural supposition that the term properly denoting the secundiues, or the membrane tlial encloses the fuetus, is
SHILOH
678
SHILOH
taken for the foetus itself. Besides, this exposition has an air ofgrossness about it which prompts its immediate rejection.
(b.) The second class consists of those who consider rtb^'J as a radical or simple derivative. Among these, again, thfre are two principal opinions.
(^I.) Hy translating the word as it is translated everj'- where else in the Bible, viz. as the name of the city in Ephraim where the ark of the covenant remained dur- ing such a long period, a siithciently good meaning is given to the passage without any violence to the Hebrew- language, and, indeed, with a precise grammatical par- allel elsewlicre (^corap. HPU." X2*1, 1 Sam. iv, 12). The simple translation is, "The scejjtre shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, till he shall go to Shiloh." In this case the allusion would be to the primacy of Judali in war (Judg. i, 1, 2; xx, 18; Numb, ii, 3; x, 14), which was to continue until the Promised Land was conquered, and the ark of the cove- nant was solemnly deposited at 8hiloh. Some Jewish writers (especially Aben-Ezra) had previously main- tained that Shiloh, the city of ICi)hraim, was referred to in this passage; and Servetus had propounded the same opinion in a fanciful dissertation, in wliich he attributed a double meaning to the words {J)e Trinitate, ii, 61, ed. 1553). But the above translation and explana- tion, as proposed and defended on critical grounds, was first suggested in modern days by Teller (Xotce Critica et Exeytfticoi in Gen. xlix, Dent, xxxiii, Exod. xv, Juck/. v [HaLe et Helmstadii, 17G6]), and it has since, with modi- tications, found favor with numerous learned men belong- ing to various schools of theology, such as Eichhorn, Hitzig, Tuch, Bleek, Ewald, Delitzsch, Kodiger, Kalisch, Luzzatto, and Davidson.