IMPOSSIBILITY OF POSSESSING A RELIABLE TRANSLATION.
It is quite evident, from the facts presented and from others which will hereafter be presented, that, if God ever gave forth a revelation of his will to the founders of the Jewish and Christian religions, the world is not in possession of it now, and can not find it in a book as old as the Christian Bible, and written by simply stringing consonants together in a line without any vowels, and without any distinction of words, and which must necessarily be an enigma that would puzzle any scholar to decipher. Hence the learned Le Clere says, "Even the learned guess at the sense in an infinity of places, which has produced a prodigious number of discordant interpretations." And Simonton, in his "Critical History," says, "It is unquestionable that the greater part of the Hebrew words of the Old Testament are equivocal in their signification, and utterly uncertain; and that even the most learned Jews doubt almost every thing in regard to their proper meaning." To talk of finding "all scripture given by inspiration of God" environed with such difficulties, is to talk nonsense. We will illustrate the nature of these difficulties by citing a case. We will look at the random guessing at the meaning of a single word of a single text by the most learned students and scholars in biblical literature. The word indicating the material of which Noah's ark was com-posed, our translation says, was gophir-wood: but the Arabic translation says it was box-wood; the Persian translation says it was pine-wood; another translation makes it red ebony; and still another declares it was wicker-work; Davidson, assuming to be "wise above what is written" the case, says it was bulrushes cemented with pitch; another writer translates it cedar-wood, &c. And thus God's Holy Book, designed for the guidance of man, has been the sport and the bauble of learned guessers in all ages of Christendom, who evidently know as much about it, in many cases, as a goose does about Greek.