John P. Peters

The Cock in the Old Testament

I N tracing the history of the domestic fowl, one is commonly confronted with the statement that there is no mention of the cock in the Old Testament, although it is evident, from the New Testament, that, in the first century of our era, it was a familiar and well-known bird in Palestine. According to Rabbinic interpretation, however, the cock is mentioned twice in the Old Testament. The earlier of these two passages is Isaiah 2211, the prophecy against Shebna, the Grand Vizier. The word here interpreted cock is the familiar Hebrew word ,~~ which regularly means man and more particularly man 8.s strong, distinguished from women, children and non-combatants, whom he is to defend; chiefly poetic,so the Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius. This passage is a somewhat difficult one to translate. The ,~M has been introduced in a perplexing manner, apparently with the intention of a sort of a pun on the word ~~ in the preceding verse. t Commentators, practically without exception, regard the word as having here its regular meaning. The Greek translators so interpreted it and apparently also the Syriac and Targum. Jerome, however, translates it by gallus gallinacew1, evidence that at his time the Rabbinical tradition was well established, as indeed it may be verified from extant sources. Elsewhere in Rabbinical literature it has the .same meaning, according to Jastrow, who cites Yoma I. 8, 20b; Y. Shek. V, 484 bot.; and perhaps Y. Succ. V, sse.

Christ's Treatment of the Old Testament

PERHAPS the easiest way to obtain a correct view of Christs treatment of the Old Testament is to take up the Gospel of St Matthew, and, following it from beginning to end, to note those passages in which reference is made by our Lord to the Old Testament, comparing them with parallel passages in other Gospels, so far as such parallels exist. It is true that this will not cover every single use of the Old Testament made, nor will it present to us Christs use in a systematic manner, but it will, I think, give us a good and sufficiently complete picture for the purposes of argument from His use to the proper use to be made by ourselves. The story of the temptations, contained both in Matt. iv. and Lk. iv., may be regarded as a summary of Christs attitude toward earlier views of divine revelation, held both by the Jews and also by other peoples. In Ex. xix. we have a description of the theophany at Sinai. The mountain is to be guarded with bounds round about, because whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death. The presence of God upon the mount is indicated by thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud, and the mount was altogether on smoke, because the Lord descended pon it in fire, and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. And the Lord bids Moses to go down and charge the people lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish. And let the priests also, who come near to the Lord, sanctify themselves, lest the Lord break forth upon them. At the time of our Lord this was commonly regarded among Jewish theologians as the highest revelation of Himself by God to man. To be sure, we have in the prophets indications of a higher and better conception, as when in the story of Elijah we are told that the Lord is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, nor in the thunder, but in the still small voice; or, as in Jeremiah, when we are told that

Notes on the Old Testament

1. The Site of the Tower of Babel (Gen. xi. 1-9).-In Dillmanns Guusis (ed. 4, p. 191) we read: In this Babel there must have been a gigantic, towerlike, but uncompleted building of much not<> riety, and to this our story attaches itself. A little later, on the same page, Dillmann says: Now there exist on the west side of the Euphrates, nine kilometres south of Hillah, huge ruins of such a tower, called Birs Nimrod, and long ago this ruin was identified with the Bel sanctuary of Herodotus, the tower of our passage. He then goes on to call attention to the fact that, There are still similar towers in many places in that country, always built in the same style, some with three, some with five, some with seven diminishing stages, so that it is not probable that it was precisely this Borsippa building to which our narrative refers. It is rather to be supposed that the present ruin of Babil, to the north of the city of Babylon itself, on the left side of the river, the most imposing of all the ruins, and the ancient temple of Bel-Merodach, rising as a high pyramid, likewise later rebuilt by Nebuchadrezzar, is the building referred to. It Vas my good fortune to visit and examine both Babil and Birs Nimrud in January of 188g. I also revisited the former the following year. Babil has been used, I presume from time immemorial, as a quarry for bricks, and the deep holes and trenches enable one without excavation to study to some extent the character of the mound. I found on the summit a mass of unbaked brick, some thirty feet or so in height. Beneath this was a solid but not homogeneous structure of baked brick. Most of the bricks which we observed bore the inscription of Nebuchadrezzar. One bore the inscription of Nabopolassar. At one point a deep excavation revealed a door. This had been built up, and later a solid mass of baked brick had been built against the wall through which it had formed an entrance. In another place some piers had been built up in the same way. Originally there had been a structure resting on the piers, between which there were openings. These openings had been built up, and then a .solid