CHAPTER I. VERSE 8.

I WILL make a wailing like dragons, tanim, and mourning as the owls, daughters of screams, ostriches.

CHAPTER VII. VERSE 17.

They shall lick the dust like a serpent, nahash; they shall move out of their holes like wORMS of the earth; like any skulking reptile that hides in holes. This word, it is conjectured, should be taken general

CHAPTER II. VERSE 11.

reptile inhabits the ground.

THE dwelling place of the lions, ariuth; and the feeding place of the young lions, cephirim ; where

CHAPTER I. VERSE 8.

the lion, ariah, walked; the old lion, labia; the lion's whelp, gur. The lion, ariah, did tear enough for his whelps, guruth; and strangled for his lionesses, lebaat. Vide on Ezek. chap. ii.

THEIR horses are swifter than leopards, more fierce than evening wolves; their horsemen shall spread themselves, and their horsemen shall come from far; they shall fly as an eagle that hasteth to eat. I do not know that I should have troubled the reader with had I not supremarks on this any passage; posed that it has been greatly misunderstood, not only by our translators, but by Mr. Harmer. We have horsemen twice over, close together; this is one sign of incorrectness; the poetical prophet would not thus have written. We must take this as one of the many places where peresh denotes not horsemen, but horses of a high breed: and as to the spreading themselves, it does not mean dividing themselves into small parcels; but when a race horse, for

CHAPTER II. VERSE 9.

instance, in running, stretches out his fore legs, to a great distance from his hind legs, he is said to spread himself, to "cover a great deal of ground," and the more ground he naturally "covers," the greater is his speed. The evening wolves, we have already corrected into desert wolves. Thus understood, the passage would read more appropriately,

Their ordinary horses, sus, are swifter than hunting leopards, nimmerim, fiercer than wolves of the desert, [vide Sheeb, plate Hyæna;] their horses of generous breed, peresh, shall spread themselves to their utmost extent in running: their horsemen shall come from far, they shall fly as an eagle, nesher, hasting to prey." This construction avoids tautology, is very spirited, and more than that, it agrees with fact and observation.

VERSE 14.

Flocks shall lie down in the midst of her; all the beasts of the nations: both the CORMORANT and the BITTERN shall lodge in the upper lintel of it; DESOLATION in the thresholds. How is she become a desolation! a place for beasts to lie down in!

1st, Flocks, not, I apprehend, of sheep or goats, but of less gentle animals; all the wild vermin from neighbouring provinces: even,

rendering; but incline to the night raven. We must identify this night raven, before we can determine on the propriety of their opinion: but, if the mode of spelling this word could be waved in point of objection, then we must own the raven may be admitted; as ghoreb is the Arabic manner of pronouncing this name, which is sufficiently near to confirm the idea of those interpreters, who render raven.

I HATED Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste, for the DRAGONS of the wilderness. Better understood, "Even Esau himself, as a nation, I did not love, equally with Israel; but placed even in his mountains, or elevated grounds, shemamah, and gave even his lower grounds, or his shores, where water is, to tanuth of the desert, such as usually abound on wastes by the sea side."

1st, Shemamah. I cannot help thinking that as the tanuth of the following clause are certainly creatures, so should this shemamah be; a creature which prevails and multiplies in waste and desert places. The passage usually referred to in support of the rendering desolation, rather confirms my suspicions, Joel iii. 19. where we read:

"The hills of Judah shall flow wine, milk; waters, a fountain," &c. all great blessings; whereas, e contra, "Egypt shall be To, , shamamah; and Edom To the desert shamamah shall be." Here seems to be a distinction between these shamamah; and moreover, we must read like to a desolation, if that sense be retained; like to a wilderness-desolation: which the text does not express.

But the question still returns: What creature can this be? and this question is the more important, because it may be asked also, has this shemamah any relation to the shemamith of Prov. xxx. 28? If it has, then we shall have to seek a creature which inhabits the lofty palaces of kings, yet the mountains of Esau; the ardent valley of Egypt, yet the cooler hills of Edom. After thinking this matter over, with all the consideration I am master of, I would ask, whether we may take the common fly for this creature? It is true, this will reduce us to the necessity of taking sebub, a well known Hebrew word for a fly, either generally, to signify flies of all sorts; or specifically, for some particular species; and whichever of these be chosen, then shemamah may signify the other. I am aware of the difficulty this conjecture will encounter; therefore propose it only as a conjecture. E.gr.

The common fly taketh hold with her hands; this we are witness to every day in summer, and her two

fore paws are very justly called hands: the naturalist has no difficulty on that. She is in the loftiest apartments of kings; this is undeniable, in our own country, equally as in Judea: she is excluded from no place whatever. The common fly inhabits Egypt: this we are very sure of, from the united testimony of travellers. Denon mentions their incessant visitations, and even that gunpowder was exploded in a house, in order to destroy them: they were swept away in heaps; yet the walls of the room were filled with them, blackened with them as with grains of gunpowder. Do they breed on the mountains of Edom? This 1 cannot say ; but I can say, that they breed on desolate places, and swarm where one should think they could find no sustenance. It is no uncommon thing to read of swarms of flies obliging persons to carry lanterns, in order to preserve the light of a candle; and many a habitation has been abandoned in a new settlement, because the teasings of the flies, and their destructive numbers, were insupportable.

I incline to think, that sebub means a fly of a specific species, Isai. viii. 18. "The Lord shall hiss for the zebub, which is in the land of Ethiopia," i. e. in the uttermost parts of the rivers of Egypt; meaning no common fly; for then, why go so far to fetch it? as flies are plenty enough much nearer at hand. To this agrees baal-sebub, Baal, the fly; no doubt the most considerable of the species, the prime of the genus would be selected for the Deity. Our medals, [vide plate, 2 Kings, i. 2.] do not, as I perceive, sufficiently determine this question for us; yet the fly they present is not the common fly. It seems to be more like a wasp; it is very sharp at the tail; its wings are pointed, not rounded; its thorax differs, and its head is unlike: in short, whatever fly this is, it is not our common fly. For the sake of distinction, I assume that sebub signifies the great blue bottle fly, or the flesh fly: this being large, may well be supposed, when dead, to cause the perfumed unguent of the dealer to stink, Eccles. x. 1. and this shemamith, shemamah; both words in the plural? may signify the common house fly, of whose swarms, and whose bitings no one can be ignorant. This conjecture may keep its place till somewhat better is offered; which,

VOL. IV.

23

if it satisfies the public, will at the same time give great pleasure to the writer of these notitia. The word rendered flies is not zebub, in Exod. viii. 21, 31; Psalm xxxviii. 45; cv. 31. in all these places it is oreb; this oreb is certainly the dogfly, or simb, [literally, perhaps, the DESERT fly.]

It might be started as a question whether the small kind of spider, which we have supposed the shemamith of Proverbs to be, might not also be the shemamah of this passage? and much might be said on the question, which is the more difficult to determine, as spiders certainly abound where flies abound, since

flies are their natural prey; nor can we receive any aid from etymology; in reference to which I shall only observe, that shem signifies to dispose, to set off, to adjust, 2 Kings, ix. 30. and shemam, more intensely, to adjust with great care; which may well express that incessant brushing of its eyes, &c. with its fore paws, whereby it seems to be always adjusting itself, which is so remarkable in the common fly. This is usually referred to the web of the spider, which certainly is adjusted with mathematical precision. The tanuth of this passage have been considered on Lam. iv. plate.

AFTER having gone through the Hebrew writings, and noticed their appellations and descriptions of natural subjects, their applications, and their distinctions, little of the same nature remains to be done in the New Testament. This part of sacred Scripture introduces very few new articles to our notice; and those which it does introduce are seldom of prime importance to us, as naturalists. Those to Those to which it refers, or alludes, are generally such as have occurred before in the Old Testament, and they are rarely, if ever, so well distinguished by name, or characterized by manners. For instance, in the Greek of the New Testament, a lion is a lion only, without any attention to distinguish whether it be the Hebrew ariah, labiah, or shachal: it may be either or neither of these, but of some other species: a viper is a viper, simply; but whether it be the peten, the tzeboa, or the tzephuon, is not indicated by the sacred writers; who, for the most part, addressing themselves to foreign nations, and writing in a foreign language, took no pains to apply the various Hebrew names specifically. If they conveyed their meaning intelligibly, though grossly, clearly, though not scientifically, they succeeded in what they undertook; they answered those purposes which engaged their labours, and that satisfied their minds. They sought higher rewards than the applause of men; they had nobler aims than to gratify the curious: and while they little cared for the nicer distinctions of human systems, in natural things, they are explicit in remarking that those divine things, whose histories they communicate, "are written that ye may believe." Moreover, The writers of the New Testament were men in humble stations of life, not like many of those who composed the Hebrew books, patronized by kings, promoted to high stations because of their talents; and bound, by their office, to the acquisition, or to the display, of more than common knowledge. These

were favoured with leisure, had the best models before them, could study and retouch their productions; and when they discoursed, they spake ex professo. No such advantages attended the apostles of Jesus: good common sense they had; sound heads, and warm hearts; but these are not all that elegance of style and regularity of composition demand, they are neither the origin of varied expression, nor of learned reference; they do not qualify for illustrations drawn from sources analogous, though distant; from allusions to the kingdoms of nature, to the productions of foreign parts, or to the scarcely understood distinctions among natural tribes, which flourished in their own country, whether vegetable or animal.

Add to this, that the writers of the Old Testament occupy a long succession of ages: what is not known in one age, occurs in another; what has not fallen under the cognisance of an early writer, has been familiar to one who, at a distance of time, succeeded in his office; whereas, the writers of the New Testament are all of one age, as well as of one country; they have all one purpose to answer, and are full of that purpose; to answer which they direct all their efforts. Are they then without allusions to the productions, the analogies, the ordinary course of nature? By no means: they refer to the properties of vegetables, to caution lest any "root of bitterness," springing up among the brethren, should poison the minds of those whom they address; they illustrate the doctrine of the resurrection, by reference to wheat, "sown naked grain" into the earth, but raised in its own proper foliage: they tell us, "star differs from star in glory;" they mention, too, clouds without water, trees twice dead; and bid us be aware of a lion, whose roarings may disturb our peace; and of those unpurified in heart and life, who, like dogs, return to their vomit, or like a sow that has been washed, to wallowing in the mire.

They did not, then, despise or condemn the study of nature surely not; but they made it conducive to their primary, religious, intention. They well knew, that "every work of God is great, and sought out of them that have pleasure therein;" and on proper opportunities, they could reason against the worship of sun, moon, and stars, by arguments drawn from nature, which disclaims them as divinities; they could remonstrate to the branches grafted into the good olivetree, against the indulgence of pride, or the humouring of caprice; they could draw morals from the composition of the human frame itself; could persuade every member of a Christian church to seek the welfare of others, that there be no schism in the body; for then, all members would painfully sympathize with any one which was suffering: nay, the very heart of man, the very knittings of joints and members, furnish more than one simile, and illustrate more than one point of doctrine; and that, too, with a power and a perspicuity truly admirable.

And indeed had they discouraged, in the smallest degree, the study of nature, they would have contradicted and counteracted the principles of their Divine Master himself. Who saw so extensively throughout nature as he did? who saw so minutely into nature as he did? who conveyed instruction so agreeably, by the medium of natural knowledge? who directed his auditors to observations founded on nature, so frequently as he did? who united religion and information, piety and philosophy, the study of things pertaining to God, and the investigation of things occurring in nature? who associated, improved, and enforced them as he did? What part of nature has he left unnoticed? The sun in the firmament, the stars of the heaven, yield comparisons of future glory; the

beasts of the earth, the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea, characterize the godly and the ungodly. We are instructed by the properties of good seed, and evil seed; we are referred to similes drawn from the grass of the field, the lily, the fig, the vine, the wheat, the tare, with many others; and among minerals, to the salt of the earth, and rocks, and stones, &c. among metals, to the purity of gold, &c. in short, every part of the world yields, as it were, a tribute of instruction and improvement, under the command of its mighty Master. Let this great example prove the efficacy of learning drawn from nature: and let it never be recollected, without recollecting also who should most benefit by these instructions. Shall ignorance of the works, the wonders, the operations of nature, perceive the propriety of those references ; the correctness and strength of those inferences, the application of those remarks, equally with a mind which has attended to the natural subjects themselves? The question needs no answer: a child cannot hesitate in determining it.

If we had not already considered what the Old Testament has offered, we should find abundant materials for our reflection in what the New Testament introduces to our notice; but, as we have no need to repeat our remarks, and are desirous of brevity in our observations, we shall notice principally what subjects are now mentioned for the first time; and shall consider all the books as making but one, though in distinct parts; rather than many, and requiring separations. To purposes of natural history, the four evangelists form but one book; and the epistles yield not more than may conveniently be combined together.

CHAPTER II. VERSES 2, 9.

THE STAR OF THE MAGI.

1st, THE magi call this star, "that of the king of the Jews;" and they do not inquire, whether he be born, but where he is born?

2dly, They say, that they, when resident in the East, saw this significant star. Scheuzer thinks they also saw this star during the whole of their journey; but this does not appear clearly, from their words; indeed, it seems to be no more necessary that they should see it during the whole of their journey to Jerusalem, than during their abode in that city. He thinks, they saw it by day as well as by night, during their journey to Jerusalem: if so, that journey, perhaps, was not long. This depends on the country

intended, under the term east. Did the Jews give this name to all regions east of Judea, east of the Jordan? If they did, we need not seek very far for the residence of these magi; nor did they consume many days in their journey.

3dly, The motion of this star. It is said to go before them from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, this being from north to south, it could be no planet or celestial star, they moving from east to west, neither could a celestial body have indicated a particular town or village, much less a house, by standing still over it. Its motion also was probably very slow. It was not much elevated above the earth. We read of meteors seen throughout a kingdom; and in 1719 was seen a flying fire, which was observed between Italy and Istria; and which might have been visible, perhaps, from Greece to England; yet this phenomenon