Page:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu/316

270 of Palestine the more we become convinced that the Sacred Writings have an unassailable basis of truth in their agreement in so many particulars with the most remarkable discoveries in Oriental archæology, ethnology, and geography.

If the Biblical record be as unhistorical as we are told it is, even by scholars of our own universities, it is the most wonderful of all literary productions. Forgers are seldom impeccable artists, and it is very strange that these old writings, upon which so much falsehood has been charged, should bear the test of comparison with the facts brought out by modern scientific research as well as they do. Bearing in mind the dicta and dogmata of the modern critical school, we should have expected the contrary.

But the sciences of sacred geography, ethnology, and criticism are not the only branches of knowledge which have largely benefited by the work of Palestine exploration. There is another line of archaeological inquiry known as palæography, the purpose of which is to discover the origin, affinities, and powers of ancient graphic systems, and to classify the results of such discovery. The object of this science in its application to Biblical criticism is to determine the forms and relative age of the various types of Hebrew and Greek writing used by ancient copyists up to the time when the art and fancy of the caligraphist were superseded by the rigid uniformity of the printing press.

Two kinds of writing are recognised as having been used at different periods by the Jewish scribes—the more ancient form or so-called Samaritan letters, and the later, or modern square Hebrew. Our knowledge of the exact original forms of the Samaritan letters was, up to a recent date, extremely limited, from the paucity of graphic material. All that the great scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who wrote on this subject had upon which to base their opinions on the matter was a small number of Jewish coins, which, although preserving the main features of the ancient alphabet, could not be pointed to with certainty as contemporaneous with the sacred autograph. Nor were Hebraists of our own age much better informed, even Gesenius and other later Semitic specialists had nothing more than Phœnician texts on which to ground their statements with respect to the ancient alphabet of Israel. No Jewish monumental text was available for research, as none such was known to be in existence. The opinions, therefore, of even the most profound scholars as to the form of the letters which were actually used by the sacred penmen were based rather on probability and analogy than on positive knowledge.

And this would still be the case but for a remarkable and most valuable discovery made in 1880 at Jerusalem. Most readers of the Bible are familiar with the Pool of Siloam, "the waters of Shiloah that go softly" (Isa. viii, 6), in which the blind man was enjoined by our Lord to wash, and after washing in which "he came seeing" (John ix, 7). It was here in 1880 that the famous inscription was found which had the merit of being the earliest extant specimen of ancient Hebrew