לא אשב חנה רעים the coupled with the regret, that no shepherd cas found who would give up דמסר נפשיה על עאנא

his life for the flock.

In criticising this parable, Mr. Greswell has noticed the use of the Greek aorist for the future; and there can be no doubt of the correctness of his criticisms, from the similar interchange of tenses in Hebrew grammar. A more decided evidence of this grammatical peculiarity, exactly corresponding to ¿ovevoare in the passage cited by him, cannot be selected than from Is. ix. 3,

והיה באחרית הימים where the very signification of the words

proves, that although the verb be in the preterite, its sense is in the future. Arguing from this, he has elucidated the perplexed passage about Zacharias, the son of Barachias, slain between the porch and the altar: shewing, that neither Zacharias the son of Jehoiada, nor Zacharias the prophet, could have been intended, and accepting our Saviour's words as prophetical, and ipovevoare, as whom ye shall slay, he powerfully urges, that Zachariah the son of Baruch (i. e. Barachias), whom Josephus records the zealots to have slain, probably in the very position mentioned, must have been the person to whom our Lord alluded. On the same principle he attributes to or, at ver. 8, a future force; and rendering pò ipov, instead of me, ingeniously refers the verse to a prophecy respecting the false Messiahs. At all events, it is critically fair, where the authors are Jews writing Greek, to explain difficulties in the construction by the grammar of their native tongue, where this can be effected without violence, especially as the Septuagint, if collated with the Hebrew, will show, that this is very often necessary.

In the discussion of the parable of the good Samaritan we in vain seek any thing beyond ordinary matter; but the point of the parable, which evidently refers to the unjust hatred which the Jews bore to the Samaritans, is not noticed in a manner calculated to show the injustice of the prejudice, as our Lord's contrast of characters plainly intimates. Other circumstances engross his attention, which have fully been detailed by preceding writers. It is granted, that the national antipathy between the Jews and the Samaritans may be traced up to the return from the captivity, and to the disputes relative to the comparative sanctity of the temple at Jerusalem, and on Gerizim; and that different insults and outrages passed on both sides: still we see nothing in all this which will authorize the aspersions which the Jews heaped on the Samaritans. That they were idolaters, as the former allege, is not easy of proof; and it is clear, on the contrary, that they vividly expected the Messiah. It is also certain, that although they are said to have accepted only the Pentateuch, to which some add the Book of Joshua, they were not without some degree of knowledge of the other Scriptures: for the Law scarcely contained sufficient to account for the

intimate preconceptions of Christ's mission, of which the Samaritan woman was possessed, according to the Evangelist John. The typical parts might have been the foundations of her expectations; but they do not seem to have entered into the discussion thus, it is far from probable, that even if the Samaritans rejected the prophetic books of the house of Judah, they should have equally disregarded those of the ten tribes of Israel. The contrary assertion is current: but on what stable authority does it rest?

Now, the well-known epistle of Mofarrej Ibn Yacùb, the Samaritan priest, cites the Messiah as the prophet promised by Moses-as the person revealed to Abraham (Gen. xv.)-as the Shiloh of Jacob's prophecy-and the star predicted by Balaam. But, when it is further stated, that at his advent all should honour and obey him-that the tabernacle should reappear and be erected on Gerizim-and that the first letter of his name should be; it is manifest that these points of faith could only have been derived from the prophetic books. One of three hypotheses must then contain the true solution:-1st. That the knowledge of a Messiah was borrowed from the Jewish prophets;-2d. That these prophecies were made known to the servants of the true God in Samaria, by individuals travelling from place to place ;-3d. That in the writings of the prophets of the house of Israel, now lost, this knowledge was contained, and thence traditionally preserved. For the true worship of God was never extinct in Israel: in Elijah's days several bowed not the knee to Baal; and in the most degenerate reigns, a remnant still adhered to the faith of their forefathers. Can we imagine them to have been unacquainted with those psalms which were sung in the tabernacle and temple, before the ten tribes seceded from Judah and Benjamin, and to have been unacquainted with the prophecies of those lost writers, who are recorded in the historical parts of the Old Testament to have pronounced their oracles before that event? If we cannot imagine these things, these sources will have been sufficient to have filled them with a knowledge and with the expectation of the Messiah. Nor even if they rejected the other canonical books, have we evidence to prove that these things were not engrafted in their commentaries or illustrations of the Pentateuch. If the Samaritan Chronicle be genuine, it corroborates this hypothesis.

Much less does it appear that the difference between the Jews and the Samaritans, at the time of the erection of the second temple, had any reference to a supposed idolatry; or that Sanballat was an idolater: it arose from the question between Jerusalem and Gerizim, and from the interdiction of marriages with foreigners; for they who repudiated their foreign wives continued in Jerusalem, whilst they who retained them emigrated to Samaria. Such causes having produced this effect, it will not follow,

that those who adhered to the fortunes and priesthood of Manasseh, however in other particulars they might have violated the law, were, ipso facto, idolaters. To which be it added, that more than 160 years after the erection of the temple on Gerizim, Josephus called it ȧvárvμov: could he have used this term if it had been dedicated to an idol? Nor has he furnished us with data concerning the dove, which has gravely been made an object of adoration in it; yet, had such an effigy existed there, it would have been very strange that he should have been ignorant of it; and far stranger that, with his violent prejudices, he should have passed it over in silence: but when, sifting this statement, we discover that this dove was first seen by Jews, and first mentioned by their writers, we know how far we can critically value the allegation.*

On the other hand, the modern Samaritans, and the Samaritan works to which we have access, contain not the slightest vestige of such a fact; and those with whom a correspondence was maintained some years ago, reprobated the notion, as a direct and positive infraction of the second commandment. Confirmatory of which is the circumstance, that when this temple was dedicated to the Hellenian Jupiter, in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, Josephus mentions the place so desecrated, as being the temple of Almighty God on Gerizim. Hence, then, we probably acquire a glimpse of the origin of the dove; for, if the temple was thus dedicated to Jupiter, it is reasonable to suppose, that in the days of the Roman power, Juno might likewise have been provided with her worship: consequently, as her name in Syriac characters would be laa, which word in Syriac means a dove, we can have no difficulty in conjecturing the origin of the fable.

History suggests to us yet another cause. If the dove was accounted sacred by the Assyrians, and if Semiramis was feigned to have been changed into one, and was worshipped under that form at Hierapolis: if the Assyrians also brought with them to Samaria many idols, the worship of which they attempted to accommodate to that of Jehovah (2 Kings xvii. 24-34); we

* Several of the Rabbinical writers, almost copying each other word for word, state, that they accounted the Samaritans as Gentiles, because they discovered the figure of a dove on the top of Mount Gerizim

and this stupid fiction has even been quoted by ,(בראש הר גריזים)

Maimonides, as authentic. In a later scandal the Jews asserted, that they found the form of a dove on the roll of their law, which calumny some scholars have wasted their time in tracing up to a certain Jewess. Others have as inaptly maintained, that Samaritan children are circumcised D: another party has connected the dove with the rites of Venus Mylitta; whilst some of the Eastern heretics invented equally credible fables about Enon, where St. John the Baptist administered his ordinance-quasi, the dove's fountain.

may easily guess, that the idolatries, which the strange colony planted by the Assyrian king from Babylon, Cuthah, Ava, Hamath and Sepharvaim, practised, were imputed to the Samaritans of later times: so that if the dove were ever worshipped in Samaria, we have no historical ground to ascribe its worship to the Samaritans. On the contrary, they proudly derive their national name from guy, e. g. mg, quasi dicas, observers of the law.

It was partly to remove this unwarrantable prejudice, that the good Samaritan was introduced into this parable; and if the nation had been such as the Jews described them, it is exceedingly improbable that he would have been selected to bear the principal part. So in Christ's conversation with the Samaritan woman, the question of Jerusalem or Gerizim is agitated; and whilst he shows the worship of the Divine Being to be spiritual, because HE is a spirit, and confined to no spot peculiarly deemed sacred, not one word falls from his lips respecting her conjectured idolatry. The whole history leads us to an opposite conclusion; for, when he states salvation to be of the Jews, the allusion is evidently to the true Messiah of the house of David, and of the tribe of Judah, in contradiction to the Samaritan notion of a Messiah of the tribe of Ephraim; which circumstance induces us to believe, that the Samaritan notion of a Messiah was derived from the lost books of the house of Israel.

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In the parable of the rich man's ground, the only thing worthy of notice is the criticism on didaxỳ, which we will transcribe :—“ There are several passages in the Gospels in which "the same word didax, doctrine, occurs, where the sense re"quires it to be understood not of the things taught, but of the "mode or manner of teaching them. Thus, Mark i. 22, and "Luke iv. 31, when our Lord had been teaching for the first "time in the synagogue of Capernaum, at the beginning of his ministry, we are told by both Evangelists, that the people were astonished at his didax, or doctrine; which the reason "immediately subjoined to account for that astonishment, under "the circumstances of the case, shows to be meant of his mode or manner of teaching; the one observing, v yàp didáσkwv “ αὐτοὺς-(which means, he had been teaching)ὡς ἐξουσίαν ἔχων, as one having authority; the other, ὅτι ἐν ἐξουσίᾳ ἦν ὁ λόγος "avrou, for his word was (or had been) in authority. After the "miracle, too, by which that first instance of teaching was sig"nalized, a miracle of dispossession performed by a word,"St. Mark ascribes to the people the very natural remark, “ τίς ἡ διδαχὴ, ἡ καινὴ αὕτη, ὅτι, &c. which must surely mean, not what new doctrine, but what new kind of doctrine; what new mode and manner of teaching is this? that even a word "is obeyed. . . . . . . . . St. John, too, when he had occasion to "mention the surprise of those who had just heard Jesus teach

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"ing in the temple, at the feast of tabernacles, supposes our “ Saviour to reply to them by saying, ἡ ἐμὴ διδαχὴ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμὴ, “allà Toυ méμ↓avrós μe, my doctrine is not mine, but his “that sent me; where, though the word doctrine may certainly "mean the sense of what was or had been taught; yet it is more "consistent with the context, and with the ostensible ground of "the surprise previously expressed at it...... that we should "understand it of the power or faculty of teaching." There is, likewise, an analogy to a part of the parable in the book of the Son of Sirach, xi. 18, 19.**

In that of "the servants left waiting, and servant left instead of his lord," very great stress is placed on the force of pepprāv: still we cannot see how its proposed sense of "to provide," or "to deliberate," can affect the subject. The point is very wordily discussed to very little purpose. But there are some valuable notes, which well deserve the attention of the critic: though we confess that we do not perceive any thing in the parable, which coincides with the Saturnalia and its parallels. That note is erudite, and would be cogent in another place. The whole has been illustrated by Schoettgen, from the Rabbinical writers; and we are of opinion, that the servant left in waiting closely answers to the Radaf of the Arabs. Nor can we assent to him in separating dixoroμev from its ordinary signification, as dichotomy is known to have been a punishment of eastern slaves, and is said by the Byzantine writers to have been occasionally practised by the Jews.

In the preliminary matter of the Parable relating to the barren fig-tree, it is conjectured, that the death of the Galilæans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices, was a recent event; that the sufferers were not the followers of Judas of Galilee; that there had been a disturbance in Jerusalem, by which some Galilæans sacrificing in the temple lost their lives;

* In the History of Harun A'rrashid, in Fakr'eddin Razi's Chronological Dynasties, on one occasion, when he gave a splendid feast, the poet Abu❜latahia repeated the following verses :—

in which the splendid enjoyment of life, amidst feasting and opulence, is forcibly contrasted with the hour of death, and the awakening of the soul from the blandishments by which it had been deceived.