Page:Companion to the Bible.djvu/14

6 without its intelligent witnesses, and zealous guardians; though some of them have been the greatest perverters of its peculiar principles, or the bitterest enemies of the christian name.

The Old Testament has been preserved by the Jews, in every age, with a scrupulous jealousy, and with a veneration for its words and letters, bordering on superstition; demonstrating their regard for it as divinely inspired. The Hebrews never were guilty of negligence in relation even to the words of their sacred books; for they used to transcribe and compare them so carefully, that they could tell how often every letter came over again in writing any book of the Old Testament.

The Old Testament contains, besides the account of the former ages of the world, the code of the Jewish laws, both civil and religious; and the records of their national history, for more than one thousand nine hundred years, from the call of Abraham; as well as prophecies, which regarded a distant futurity, and which have respect to times yet to come. The celebrated Roman historian Tacitus, who lived in the apostolic age, speaks of the Jewish books as very ancient in his time. They were translated from the Hebrew into the Greek language more than two thousand and one hundred years ago; and they were possessed in both those languages by the Jews. By those Jews who lived among the Greeks, they were read in their synagogues every sabbath day, in the translation, the same as the Hebrew Scriptures were read by the native Jews: commentaries were written upon them by their learned doctors; copies of them were circulated in every nation where the Jews were scattered, and thus the sacred books were multiplied without number.

The books of Moses, including Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, were written more than three thousand and three hundred years ago, and nearly fifteen hundred years before the christian era: many of the other books were published above a thousand years, and those of the elder prophets about eight hundred years before the advent of Christ,