When I was at Bath I read in the local paper a beautiful letter aptly alluding to the Mount Fiesole of Bath and quoting what has been termed that mysterious verse of David’s:
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills——.”
Well! the other day a great friend of that wonderful Hebrew scholar, Dr. Ginsburg—he died long since at Capri—told me that Ginsburg had said to him that all the Revisers and Translators had missed a peculiar Hebraism which quite alters the signification of this opening verse of the 121st Psalm: It should read:
“Shall I lift up mine eyes to those hills? DOTH my help come from thence?”
And this is the explanation:
Those hills alluded to were the hills in which were the Groves planted in honour of the idols towards which Israel had strayed. So in the second verse the inspired tongue says:
“No! My help cometh from the Lord! He who hath made Heaven and Earth! (not these idols).”
I have had an admiration for Ginsburg ever since he shut up the two Atheists in the Athenæum Club, Huxley and Herbert Spencer, who were reviling Holy Writ in Ginsburg’s presence and flouting him. So he asked the two of them to produce anything anywhere in literature comparable to the 23rd Psalm as translated by Wyclif, Tyndale, and Coverdale. He gave them a week to examine, and at the end of it they confessed that they could not.
One of them (I could not find out which it was) wrote:
“I won’t argue about nor admit the Inspiration claimed, but I say this—that those saintly men whom Cromwell formed as the company to produce the Great Bible of 1539 were inspired, for never has the spirit of the original Hebrew been more beautifully transformed from the original harshness into such spiritual wealth.”