Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 237 CHAPTER III. Aids To The Critical Elaboration Of The Old Testament. Section 139 A.—General List of the Critical Aids. The holy Scriptures of the Hebrews, as we are informed by history, have experienced the fate common to all written monuments of antiquity; by means of accidents and the errors of transcribers, much of their original shape has been lost. Criticism must therefore exercise its office, if that original form, though not entirely, yet in part is to be restored. Aids to this end are in existence, and, though insufficient, perhaps, for the extermination of a very large portion of the most ancient errors, are nevertheless of the last importance towards the discovery and extirpation of those which have arisen in the last 2,000 years. They may be divided, according to the nature of the assistance they afford, into three classes— 1. Faults of the earliest times are discovered by the parallel passages, and with regard to the books of Moses by the Samaritan Pentateuch. 2. The later variations down to the completion of the Masoretical recension by the ancient authors of versions (Philo and Josephus), the Church fathers (Ephraim the Syrian), Origen and Jerome, the Talmud, and the Masora itself. 3. Various readings of the Masoretical recension are found in the modern Rabbins, manuscripts, and editions. 4. When these means for the correction of corrupted passages are insufficient, recourse must be had, for the Old Testament ,as well as all other writings of antiquity, to conjecture. I.—Parallel Passages. Section 139 B.—Short Notice of this Means. Parallel passages are not only sources of variations, but also an excellent means to determine their adjudication, also for discovering and correcting errors which may have arisen—as soon, however, as ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.