BEFORE THE FLOOD, COMPRISING SOME EVIDENCE TENDING TO PROVE THAT The Language in which the Events, NARRATED BY MOSES IN THE FIRST FEW CHAPTERS OF THE BOOK OF IS MAINLY, IF NOT ALTOGETHER, DERIVED FROM, AND ORIGINATED IN THE EVENTS THEMSELVES AND THE CONSEQUENCES RESULTING THEREFROM BY THE REV. J. CURTIS, LATE PERPETUAL CURATE OF SMISBY. And the whole Earth was of one language and of one Speech.-GENESIS, Ch. ii, V. 1. LONDON: PIPER, STEPHENSON & SPENCE, 23, PATERNOSTER ROW. 1854. Introduction. In the first Chapter of the book of Genesis, Moses narrates the order in which certain creations of various matters by the Almighty took place, and after having enumerated the particular work of each of the five consecutive days of the Creation, he records as the last "work which God made" the creation of man on the Sixth or last day. It follows therefore, with reference to the detail of these occurrences by Moses, that the events so recorded by him were, according to his own statement, prior to the existence of any language, inasmuch as no human being had as yet been created. The Holy Scriptures, as early as the Apostle's days were deemed by some to be "cunningly devised Fables," (2 Pet. ch. i, v. 16.) and probably the number of those who still consider them to be such, has not greatly diminished. There arises then this double dilemma, viz.: that Moses must either have imagined and invented these events, and the details of them, such as he narrates, or he might have received a tradition of them from the Patriarchs, to whom they might have been made known, probably by Adam himself; all consideration of the means, by which a knowledge of events occuring previous to his existence was obtained by Adam, being for the present omitted. If it is argued that Moses invented these Creations of various matters, as for the sake of argument it may be conceded, and that the language which he uses to describe these respective creations, such as Light and Darkness, Heaven and Earth, &c. (Gen. ch. i. v. 5, 8, 10.) was the common conventional language in use amongst his countrymen, the Jews, at the time he wrote, by which they designated these several objects, it may on the other hand be said that, neither Moses, nor his countrymen, nor their ancestors were able arbitrarily to conventionalize combinations of two or more circumstances that required a new term to be compounded of existing words, or roots, to form a word which should express these combinations. All language, whether correctly or not, has been usually considered to be conventional in its roots, that is to say arbitrary, thus, any monosyllable as AB, BA, EB, BE &c., &c. or any other combination of Vowels and one or more Consonants might be selected at first to designate Light or Darkness, Heaven or Earth, or any other object; but when these roots were combined in order to express two objects in conjunction, arbitrary conventionalism ceased, the compound was no longer arbitrary, but the result of the reasoning which induced the composition of the word out of these two roots. This may be illustrated by reference to Genesis, ch. xxviii, v. 19, where Jacob is reported to have changed the name of the city Luz to Bethel. (a) It may be assumed that the name Luz was originally arbitrary and conventional, but the whole history of the causes and reasons why Jacob called the name of that place Bethel (a) is given in the preceding verses: "And Jacob went out from Beersheba and went towards "Haran, and he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there "all night because the sun was set and he took of the stones of "that place and put them for his pillow and lay down in that "place to sleep. And Jacob awaked out of his sleep and he said, "how dreadful is this place, this is none other but the House of ""God (a) and this is the Gate of Heaven,' and Jacob rose up early "in the morning and took the stone that he put for his pillow, "and set it up for a pillar and poured oil upon the top of it, and "he called the name of that place Bethel; (a) but the name of that "city was called Luz (b) at the first." (a) Bethel, or the House of GOD, was a short and effective mode of describing the refreshing b There are two words in Hebrew which signify Almond Tree: the one (LU Z), the other p (SH K D), which latter also signifies Sleepless Watching, and the conjunction of these two words in Jacob's mind seems to have pointedly indicated to him that his dream was no dream, but an actual vision of the Almighty, and the promise and the covenant actual and real. This involution of names (if it may be so termed) and reference to other words of equivalent import in one respect, but conveying a different, yet more pertinent meaning in others, are not only common in the Holy Scriptures, but may be met with, in almost every Chapter from Genesis to Malachi. |