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443 THE JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA

443

side by side, though this by no means |)rechides the possibility that a writer, either from iirnorance or inadvertenee, may liave occasionally inserted Animaic letters into liis Hebrew text, or vice versji Sucli errors would occur especially when the parallel letters difThat this mixiii;: of the letters fered very sliirlitly. occurred in the inscription below, which is regarded by authorities as the oldest one with square charac-

Alphabet

time, construct the grotto, but altered the work of In this word the others to suit his own purposes. letter J? has the old Semitic form and the letters a. n. and ' are similar to the Aramaic characters of the Persian period, while the T has taken the form of a much later date (see Plate III., col. 1). The inscription of Os-suary Inscription of "Slialamthe Bene He/ir to be Zlon. Daugliter <if Simeon the found on a family Priest." vault in the valley of Jehoshaphat probably dates from the tirsl century n.c, and was afterward regarded as the resting-place of St. James (see "Corpus Inscriptionum Hebraicarum," Plate I., No. (i; Driver, • Notes on the Hebrew Te.xt of the Book of Samuel." pp. xxiii. :and Berger. "Histoire de I'Ecriture." 2d ed.. pp. 257 et seq.). "From about the same period are to be dated the ossuaries, or stone sarcophagi wherein the bones of those deceased were preserved; these are found in great numbers in Palestine (see Plate HI, col. 2; "Corpus In.scrii). Ilebra." col. 76: and ,

InscrtpUon In a Cavern at 'Arak-el-Emir. ters.

may be due

to chance.

The

Clermont-Ganneau,

inscription consists

in "

Revue Arche-

even of these can be

NotwithInscriptions. standing the lack of care in the ex-

and Christian tradition, the introduction of the Aramaic script and its use for the Holy Scriptures are directly attributed to Ezra the

ecution of the inscriptions and in spite of their uninteresting details, these stone chests possess an apjireciable value, because by their aid may

of only

"live letters,

and not

all

identified with certainty. Acconlinir to both .Jewish

Stone-Chest ologique,"

serie

iii., i.

237).

IX IMMtia^n IN.SCRIPTION

OX FAMI1.V VaCLT Of THE BEXK

)jnv 11)17;!' ^11^'

(

n-jn -ja

D I'tn i

-

•

c' >J3

scribe (see Sanh. 21/i. 22(j: Yer. Meg. 71'/; Origen, col. 1104: Jerome. " Prologus Galeaed. -Migne, ii tus"). The former statement is certainly not correct; nor can the latter be established satisfactorily. Supposing the inlroduetioii of the Aramaic script to have taken place in the tiftli century oreveii later, the older ,

manuscripts would Imrdly have been destroyed on At all events, this iiiiieh is assured. that account. that, irrespective of the Siinmrilaiis.lln' knowledge of the older script still existed among the Jews for several centuries (Meg. Hi.-. Origen. "lli'Xiipla" on

Ezek. ix. 4. (|Uotesthe testimony ofacon verted Jew). Ancient moiuiments with .S(iiiare letters are very rare. That at 'Arakcl Emir, nferred toabove, southoast of EsSiilt on the Wadics Sir. may he considered the oldest (see Chwolson. "('or|>usInseriptionum He braicanun." 1 l,id/,barski, " llanilliueh." pp.1 17.1 !MI. 4H^I). It consists of one single word. The 'Aralf- the correct reading of which is prohel-Emir In- ably n"31V. The cavns of and Eleazar. sons of Monlah. of the children of Hezlr.")

be traced the development of the square letters into characters which do not greatly differ from the present ones. Even before the formation of the S(|uare characters, most of the letters could already be ni!i(l<' with one stroke. But the attempt was presently made to give them such forms tlail a whole word might be wi-itten with lis few breaks as possilile. and each letter be gniduidly made to approach as near as possilile the one following; thus in some of the letters w hich wei-e originally dosed by a perpendicular n'tltD"!' line, this line was bent toward the left.

But

tm)k place ligature with the next letter was

this heiidiiigof the perpen- Inscription of "Judoli the Scribe"

disind)le or permissible: when the letter stood at the end of the word, the change in the sign was unneces sjiry. and the tinal letters ]'. t). |. - still relitined their originid downward stroke: though they are eiiiisidei-.ibly lengthen<d in the forms of our prest-nt