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Letter 14] much land as could be included in the "thong" made from a bull's hide.

But now to come to the particular instance which is the only one I shall give from the Old Testament. You must recollect, and I think you ought to have been perplexed by, the astounding incident in the life of Samson, connected with the "ass's jawbone." The hero is said first to have slain some hundreds of men with the jawbone of an ass, and then to have thrown away the jawbone in the anguish of a parching thirst. Upon this, the Lord is said, (in the Old Version of the Bible) to have opened a fountain of water in the hollow of the jawbone in answer to his cry: and the fountain was henceforth named En-hakkore, i.e. the "fountain of him that calleth," because Samson "called upon the Lord." Moreover, when he cast away the jawbone, he is said to have called the place Ramath-lehi; which the margin (not of the New Version but of the Old) interprets, "the lifting up of the jawbone" or "the casting away of the jawbone." Without pausing to dwell on the extreme improbability of the details of the story, I will merely state the probable explanation. It is probable that the valley containing the "hollow" in which the fountain lay, was called, from the configuration of the place, "the Ass's Jawbone," before the occurrence of any exploit of Samson in it. Indeed we find it actually called "Lehi," or "Jawbone," in the narrative now under discussion, just before the supposed incident of the jawbone took place: "The Philistines went up, and pitched in Judah, and spread themselves in Lehi (Jawbone)," Judges xv. 9. This latter fact indeed is not conclusive (as the narrator, living long after the event, might possibly use the name of the place handed down to him, even in writing of a time when he believed the name to have been not yet given): but the probability of a natural explanation of