HEBREW 595 Gen. xi. (and Gen. x. 24) Eber is the great-grandson of Shem through Arphaxad, and ancestor of Terah through Pele ", Reu, Serug, and Nahor. These are not to be taken as the names of individual men. Several of them are designations of places or districts near the upper waters of the Euphrates and Tigris, and among other circumstances the place at the head of the series assigned to the district of Arrapachitis (Arphaxad), through which a migration from Ararat to the lands occupied by the Semites in his torical times would first pass, suggests the probability that tha genealogy is not even meant to exhibit a table of ethno- i logical affinities, but rather presents a geographical sketch of the early movements of the Hebrews, who are personified under the name of Eber. If this is so we can hardly venture to assert (with some scholars) that the author of the list (the Levitical Elohist) extended the name of Hebrews to all descendants of Terah. 1 The case is different with another and apparently older record of which a frag ment seems to be preserved in Gen. x. 21, 25-30. Here there is no intermediate link between Shem and Eber. Sons of Shem and sons of Eber appear to be coextensive ideas, and to the latter are reckoned not only the descend ants of Peleg (Aramaeans, Israelites, Ishmaelite Arabs, <fec.), but the South Arabian tribes of Joktan. We possess no information which casts light on this wide conception of the sons of Eber, and in the ordinary language of the Old Testament Hebrew and Israelite are strictly synonymous. Compare, however, the interesting conjectures of Sprenger, Alte Geographic Arabiens (Bern, 1875), p. 294, who identifies Peleg with Falag in Central Arabia, and h nds in the record a witness to the truth of the view that Arabia is the original centre of the Semitic dispersion, a view which is shared by other scholars, as Hitzig (Gcschichic Israels, pp. 26, S9), and Schrader (Z. D. M. G., 1873, pp. 397-424). In this connexion it is perhaps worth while to note the Arabic Gentile name Obri, belonging to "Obra, a minor division of the Joktanic tribe of the Azd (Lubb-il-lubdb, ed. Veth, p. 175). When it is recognized that Eber in Genesis is not an actual personage but an ethnological or geographical abstrac tion, we are thrown back on etymological conjecture as to the origin of the name of Hebrews. Eber means the further bank of a river, from a root meaning to cross. Hence in Gen. xiv. 13 the Septuagint renders Abram the Hebrew by 6 Trepan]?, " the crosser." 2 Grammatically more accurate, while resting on the same etymology, is the render ing of Aquila, o Trepan-???, "the man from the other side" of the Euphrates, which is the explanation of Jewish tradi tion (Breshit Rabba, and Eashi) and still generally adopted. It is, however, far from satisfactory, and almost of necessity depends on the theory that the name was fixed upon the Hebrew immigrants by the earlier inhabitants of Canaan. 3 A modified form of the etymology takes eber in the Arabic sense of a river bank, and makes the Hebrews " dwellers in a land of rivers" (Steiner in the Bibel-Lex., ii. 613). This goes well with Peleg (watercourse), as in Arabia we have the district Falag, so named because it is furrowed by waters (Sprenger, Geog. Arab., p. 234).* The name "Hebrew Language." By the Hebrew language we understand the ancient tongue of the Hebrews in Canaan the language in which the Old Testament is composed, with the exception of the Aramaic passages (Jer. x. 1 1 ; Ezra iv. 8-vi. 18; vii. 12-26; Dan. ii. 4-vii. 28). But 1 The Terahites, according to other testimonies, are Aramaeans (Gen. xxu. 20 seq.; Deut. xxvi. 5), but our Elohist, who can hardly have written before the captivity, makes Aram a separate offshoot of Shem, having nothing to do with Eber (Gen. x. 22, 23). 2 Compare Jerome, Qucest. Hebr. on the passage, and Theodoret, Qu,. LXI. in Gen. 3 Compare Ewald, Gesch. Israels (3d ed.), i. 407 seq. (Eng. trans., s4), where also other etymologies are noticed. 4 Complete ignorance of Hebrew made it possible for early Christian writers to derive the name of the Hebrews from Abraham. See Bocharts Phaleg, lib. ii., cap. 14. Other guesses will be found in the Onomastica. we do not find that this language was called Hebrew by those who spoke it. It is the lip, i.e., speech of Canaan, Isa. xix. 18, or, as spoken in Southern Palestine, TVlin 11 Jewish (2 Kings xviii. 26 ; Neh. xiii. 24). The later Jews call it the holy tongue in contrast to the profane Aramaic dialect (commonly though improperly enough called Syro- Chaldaic) which long before the time of Christ had super seded the old language as the vernacular of the Jews. This change had already taken place at the time when the expression "in Hebrew" (e/3paurrt) first occurs (Prologue to Sirach) ; and both in the Apocrypha and in the New Testament the ambiguous term, naming the language after those who used it, often denotes the contemporary verna cular, not the obsolete idiom of the Old Testament. But the other sense was admissible (e.g., Rev. ix. 11, and so fre quently in Josephus), and naturally became the prevalent one among Christian writers who had little occasion to speak of anything but the Old Testament Hebrew. 5 In modern usage it is incorrect to call the Jewish Aramaic Hebrew ; though uneducated Jews apply the name even to the corrupt German and Spanish jargons which they are accustomed to write and print in Hebrew characters. Character and Philological Relations of Jlebreiv. Hebrew is a language of the group which since Eichhorn has generally been known as Semitic, and of which Arabic and Ethiopic (Southern Semitic), the various dialects of Aramaic, and the language of the Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions are the other chief representatives. From its geographical position as the language of Palestine bet ween the Aramaeans of the north and the Arabs of the south, Hebrew has been called Middle Semitic. Or Aramaic Assyrian and Hebrew may be grouped together as Northern Semitic in contrast to Arabic and Ethiopic. The affinities of the Semitic languages are so close that they may fairly be com pared with a sub-group of the Indo-Germanic family for example, with the Teutonic languages. The fundamental unity of the Semitic vocabulary is easily observed from the absence of compounds (except in proper names) and from the fact that almost all words are derived from their roots in definite patterns (measures) as regular as those of gram matical inflexion. The roots regularly consist of three consonants (seldom four or five), the accompanying vowels having no radical value, but shifting according to gram matical rules to express various embodiments of the root idea. The triliteral roots are substantially common to the whole Semitic group, subject to certain consonantal per mutations, of which the most important are strikingly analogous to those laid down by Grimm for the Teutonic languages. There are four sounds in Arabic unknown to Hebrew and Aramaic, and for which the former regularly has a sibilant, the latter a lingual in one case a deep guttural. This guttural (J?), and the palatal letters which in the following table are represented by d, s, t, z, are peculiar Semitic sounds. Arabic. th O dh i z fc d Hebrew. Sk W z T A ram lie. t n J? [also s] On the last equation see Lagarde, Semitica, i. 22 ; Noldeke in Z. D. M. G., xxxii. , 405 ; and on the permutation of consonants in general, Merx, Gram. Syr., 24 ; Stade in Morgcnl. Forschungen (1875), p. 179 seq. Whether the Arabic or Aramaic forms are the older is disputed. No one maintains that the Hebrew forms are original.
- The term " Hebrew language" seems to have originated with the
Greeks or Hellenists. Philo, however, calls the language of the Old Testament Chaldee (De Vita Mosis, ii. 5, 6 ; cf. Jerome on Dan. i.). On the use of the. expression "Hebrew language" in the Talmud, seo
Berliner, Beitrage zur heb. Or. (Berlin, 1879), p. 5.
