3. A theory involving fewer gratuitous assumptions
is that in the middle of the ephod, or within its folds, there was a stone or plate of gold on which was en- graved tiie sacred name of Jehovah, the Skeiii-ZKunme- phoras/i (q. v,) of Jewish Cabalists; and that by virtue of this, fixing his gaze on it, or reading an invocation which was also engraved with the name, or standing in his ephod before the mercy-seat, or at least before the vail of the sanctuary, he became capable of prophesy- ing, hearing the divine voice within, or listening to it as it proceeded, in articulate sounds, from the glory of the Shechinah (Buxtorf, /oc. ciC, 7 ; Lightfoot, vi, 278 ; Braunius, De Vestitu Ihhr. ii; Saalschiltz, Archdolo(j. ii, 363). A wilder form of this belief is found in the Cab- alistic book Zvhar. There the Urim is said to have had the divine name in forty-two, the Thummim in seventy-two letters. The notion was probably derived from the Jewish invocations of books like the Claeiada Salomnnis. See Solomon.
Another form of the same thought is found iu the statement of Jewish writers that the Holy Spirit spake sometimes by Urim, sometimes by prophecy, sometimes by the Bath-Kol {Seder Olam, c, xiv, in Braunius, loc. cit.), or that the whole purpose of the unknown sym- bols was "ad excitandam prophetiam" (K. Levi ben- Gershon, in Buxtorf, /oc. cit.; Kimchi, in Spencer, iit inf.). A more eccentric form of the " writing" theory was propounded by the elder Carpzov, who maintained that the LTrim and Thummim were two confessions of faith iu the JMessiah and the Holy Spirit (Carpzov, App. Crit. i, 5).
4. Spencer {De Ur.et Th.) presents a singular union of acuteness and extravagance. He rightly recognises the distinctness of the two things which others had confounded. Whatever the Urim and Thummim were, they were not the twelve stones, and they were distin- guishable one from the other. They were placed in- side the folds of the doubled choshen. Resting on the facts referred to, he inferred the identity of the Urim and the Teraphim. This was an instance in which the divine wisdom accommodated itself to man's weakness, and allowed the debased superstitious Israelites to re- tain a fragment of the idolatrous system of their fa- thers, in order to wean them gradually from the system as a whole. The obnoxious name of Teraphim was dropped. The thing itself was retained. The very name Urim was, he argued, identical in meaning with Teraphim (Urim = " lights, fires;" Seraphim = " the burning, or fiery ones ;" and Teraphim is but the same word, with an Aramaic substitution of n for O). It was therefore a email image probably in human form. So far, the hypothesis has, at least, the merit of being inductive and historical; but when he comes to the question how it was instrumental oracularly, he passes into the most extravagant of all assumptions. The im- age, when the high-priest questioned it, spoke by the mediation of an angel, with an articulate human voice, just as the Teraphim spoke, in like manner, by the in- tervention of a daemon ! In dealing with the Thum- mim, which he excludes altogether from tlie oracular fimctions of the Urim, Spencer adopts the notion of an Egvplian archetype, which will be noticed further on.
5. Michaelis {Lairs of Moses, v, 52) gives his own opinion that the Urim and Thummim were three stones, on one of which was written Yes, on another No, while the third was left blank or neutral. The three were used as lots, and the high-priest decided according as the one or the other was drawn out. He does not think it worth while to give one iota of evidence; and the notion does not apjiear to have been more than a pass- ing caprice. It obviously fails to meet the phenomena. Lots were familiar enough among the Israelites (Numb. xxvi, 55; Josh, xiii, 6 sq. ; 1 Sam. xiv, 41; Prov. xvi, 33), but the Urim was something solemn and peculiar. In the cases where the Urim was consulted, the an- swers were always more than a mere negative or af- firmative.
URIM AND TIIUMMIM
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URIM AND TIIUMMIM
G. The conjecture of Ziillij; (Comm. in Apoc. Exc. ii), tliougli adopted by Winer {Rialir. ),c&n hardly be looked ou as more satisfyiiif;. With him tlie Urim are bright, i. e. cut and polished, diamonds, in form like dice ; the Thummira perfect, i. e. whole, rough, uncut ones, cacli class with inscriptions of some kind engraved on it. He supposes a handful of these to have been carried in the pouch of the high-priest's choshen, and when he wished for an oracle, to have been taken out by him and tlirown on a table, or, more probably, on the ark of the covenant. As they fell, their position, according to traditional rules known only to the high-priestly fami- lies, indicated the answer. lie compares it with for- tune-telling by cards or coffee-grounds. The whole scheme, it need hardly be said, is one of pure invention, at once arbitrary and offensive. It is at least question- able whether the Egyptians had access to diamonds, or knew the art of polishing or engraving them. See Diamond. A handful of diamond cubes, large enough to have words or monograms engraved on them, is a thing which has no parallel in Egyptian archeology, nor, indeefl, anywhere else.