CONTENTS OF No. XIII.-VOL. VII.

FIRST LESSONS IN BIBLICAL CRITICISM

ON THE INTERPRETATION OF 1 CORINTHIANS vii. 25-40

OUR LORD'S DISCOURSES AND SAYINGS

ANNOTATIONS ON THE NEW TESTAMENT

CORRESPONDENCE:- Tenses of Hebrew Verbs; On the Inter-

pretation of Romans ix. 3; Dr. Tregelles' Prospectus of

a Critical Edition of the Greek New Testament

Notices of Books

Biblical Intelligence

Quarterly List of English and Foreign Works in Sacred

Literature

216

235

251

253

THE

JOURNAL

OF

SACRED LITERATURE.

NO XIV. - APRIL, 1851

439

447

THE JEWISH WAR UNDER HADRIAN AND TRAJAN

MISCELLANEA:-Ephes. v. 14; Paul's Thorn in the Flesh

ANALECTA BIBLICA

CORRESPONDENCE:-Dr. S. P. Tregelles on the Textual Criti-

cism of the New Testament; Dr. Samuel Lee on the Tenses

of Hebrew Verbs; On the Interpretation of Romans ix. 3 ;

On the Proper Subjects of Faith and Prayer

451

459

495

THE

JOURNAL

OF

SACRED LITERATURE.

NO. XIII. JAN. 1851.

NINEVEH.

Nineveh and its Remains; with an Account of a Visit to the
Chaldean Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-
Worshippers; and an Inquiry into the Manners and Arts of
the Ancient Assyrians. By AUSTEN HENRY LAYARD, Esq.,
D.C.L. Seventh Thousand, 2 vols. 8vo. Murray, 1849.
Notes from Nineveh, and Travels in Mesopotamia, Assyria, and
Syria. By the Rev. J. P. FLETCHER, 2 vols. 12mo. Colburn,
1850.

Nineveh and Persepolis: an Historical Sketch of Ancient Assyria and Persia, with an Account of the recent Researches in those Countries. By W. S. W. VAUX, M.A. Arthur Hall, Virtue, and Co., 12mo. 1850.

Nineveh its Rise and Ruin, as illustrated by Ancient Scriptures and Modern Discoveries. A Course of Lectures delivered at Claremont Chapel, London. With Additions and Supplementary Notes. By the Rev. JoHN BLACKBURN. Partridge and Oakey, 1850, 16mo. 232 pp.

If we could conceive the invention of the diving-bell to have been postponed for some thirty centuries, and at the end of that period applied to the examination of the Royal George; presuming also that that vessel shall have been left comparatively uninjured by time and the action of the water, a notion might be formed of an unborn generation obtaining a glimpse of certain characteristics of our own times. If it were possible for other sources of information to have perished, or to have survived only in a scanty form, there would still be much that they could learn from

VOL. VII.-NO. XIII.

B

the

the discovery of a sunken ship. Her guns and small arms would indicate the mode of our warfare; her compasses, sextants, and charts, would record our science; and although, in the case we have happened to select, probably but few pictures, and still less sculpture would be found, the arts of construction would be magnificently illustrated in the vessel itself. Evidence of this kind is in many instances all that remains to us, enabling us to form conceptions of the manners and customs of extinct peoples. Mutilated statues, fragmentary architectural remains, warlike and domestic instruments encrusted with venerable oxide, frescoes from which certain pigments have refused to disappear, are the memoranda obscurely noted in the world's chronicle. Nevertheless, though they be obscure when presented alone, they are valuable as auxiliaries. They are like the pictorial illustrations of a printed book which in themselves are adapted to amuse those superficial readers who can manage to enjoy looking at the pictures,' but to a less juvenile student throw light upon its learned contents. The reader will be able to call to mind those extraordinary discoveries in America, which are as the pictures without the book; or the tombs of Etruria, which record the civilization of a people of which we know little more than the name. Carthage has bequeathed us no literature, and its débris, while they tell us of its warlike as well as its commercial activity, give us but a meagre conception of its cultivation of the mind and of the taste.

We may regard these various remains as proposing a series of speculations on the progress of man as a civilized being. The idea is very common with ourselves, that our own civilization is an advanced development of what has uniformly progressed from the earliest times. Without giving the subject much thought, we contrast the painted bodies of our aborigines with the Exhibition of 1851, and inasmuch as railways, and electric telegraphs, and national schools, and an efficient post-office, are things that have sprung up within our own memory, we infer that progress is the law now, and, ergo, has always been so. Unfortunately, antiquarian discoveries suggest the perplexing inference that retroOrmuzd has sent one gression has been at work in various ages. and Ahriman the other. Any thinking man who will take the trouble this year to pay alternate visits to the cast-iron building in Hyde Park and to the Ionic edifice in Bloomsbury, will confess to some difficulty in expounding the laws by which civilization has moved, or in determining by what marks we can at any time best estimate its measure. It would appear to have (as mathematicians would say) several maxima and minima. Like an undulating country, it rises and descends: it has its valleys and its mountains. In fact nations, when blessed with prosperity, appear in all ages of

the