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: Ill THE DATlNG OF GENESlS XXll [From the i'lhliotheca Sacra, April, 1910.] One of the oldest critical arguments is furnished by the proverb in Genesis xxii. which appears to refer to the Temple mountain. If so, the chapter could not be earlier than the time of Solomon. This rests on two points —" the land of Mo- riah " in verse 2, and the wording of the proverb itself in verse 14. Textual criticism disposes of both these points. The word " Moriah " is notoriously corrupt. A land of Moriah is quite unknown, and the ancient authorities all differ from the Massoretic text. The SamaVitan has nNTion, the LXX Tijv infrrjijv, Aquila rrjv Karafa.vfj, Symmachus Tt oirrafft'as, the Vulgate visionis. These variants abundantly attest corruption, but offer no help to the true text. The Syriac, however, has a much more probable reading, " the land of the Amorite," and this seems to be correct. The proverb itself is rendered by the LXX ev ry opei icvpios tof0T), which may be translated, " In the Mount the Lord was seen," though, if the aor;st is gnomic, it would be more correct to translate " is seen." Apart from the tense, which is doubtful, this rendering does not postulate a different Hebrew consonantal text from the Massoretic. It is merely a question of vowel-points. This Septuagintal reading arrests attention for two reasons. We may be sure that, however we may interpret it, the expression " the Lord was seen " would rightly or wrongly be regarded as an anthropomorphism by many readers. It is wellknown that the Septuagintal translators avoided anthropomorphisms. "A dogmatic interest," says Dr. Swete, " has been detected in some of these paraphrastic renderings, chiefly where the LXX have endeavoured to avoid the anthropomorphisms of the original; examples are most frequent in ...