The Chaldean plural is used in several words, for instance:

Examples of Incorrect Expressions in Jeremiah.

With respect to the New Testament, I have required a similar notice from my son William, who has made the Greek language in general, and its deviations in the writings of the Gospel, the object of particular and careful study. I insert, also, the note which he has drawn up upon the subject:—

"On first approaching the text of the New Testament, after having learnt the Greek language and grammar in the classical writers, we are struck by numerous irregularities of expression: amongst these, however, we must carefully distinguish those which constitute merely particular and singular modes of expression from those which are real faults. The former are susceptible of explanation and justification by different examples and different arguments; the latter are not capable of being reconciled with the elementary and necessary laws of language. Thus we may justify such or such a strange form of conjugation or of declension, which would be accounted a barbarism by a school boy, but which was nevertheless in actual use in some one or other of the local dialects, written and spoken by the Greeks. Again, however it may have been the rule in Greek to set the verb in the singular when used with a neuter substantive in the plural, the rule has not been invariably observed even by the purest classical writers, and we may justify by exceptions collected here and there in their compositions, several passages of the New Testament which, at first sight, might appear amenable to a charge of solecism. Thus, in short, after our attention having, at first sight, been arrested and our minds disconcerted by other passages in which the sacred writer has confounded the sense of two words which resemble each other, as μαρτύρομαι, which signifies summon a witness, and which St. Peter employs instead of μαρτυρέω which means, give testimony,[Footnote 127] as ἀδυνάτειν, which signifies to be incapable, and which St. Matthew and St. Mark employ in the sense of being impossible, [Footnote 128]—as μεσουράνημα, which signifies the meridian or zenith of a star, and which, on three occasions in the New Testament, is used in the sense of in the middle of the air,—or, even when we meet words, not merely strange to the ear, but formed without attention to the rules and in contradiction to analogy, as πειθός for πείθανος[Footnote 129]—we may again, without any departure from logical rules, by judicious or subtle distinctions, escape from the difficulties which the passages suggest, and have a perfect right to do so. But after having made allowances for the irregularities susceptible of explanation in the language of the New Testament, there still remain some which are real faults. The same word cannot be written by the same hand, at an interval of but three pages, both masculine and feminine, as the word ἶρις, rainbow, in the Apocalypse. [Footnote 130] When the substantive is feminine, the adjective cannot be masculine, as τὴν ληνὸν ... τὸν μέγαν. [Footnote 131]

[Footnote 127: 1 Peter i. 11.]
[Footnote 128: Matthew xvii. 20; Luke i. 37.]
[Footnote 129: 1 Corinthians ii 1.]
[Footnote 130: Compare iv. 3, and x. 1.]
[Footnote 131: Apocalypse xiv. 19.]

When the substantive is in the accusative, the adjective cannot be in the nominative. In such an employment of words we are able to trace in the sacred writings the hand of man, marks of human imperfection and error; and we must not forget that these faults become more numerous and grosser the greater the antiquity of the MS. in which we find them, and the purer the Jewish origin of the writer. Thus the Greek of the Apocalypse is singularly incorrect, at the same time that the imaginative turn of the expression is remarkably Hebraic. [Footnote 132] In the text, styled the received text, and which was fixed in the 16th century, many of these faults have disappeared, because it has borrowed from MSS. of then recent date. But now that biblical philosophy has mounted higher, we can discern how the copyists, one after the other, actuated by pious scruples, or thinking only to correct some error of their predecessors, have little by little effaced what appeared to them too great a departure from rules to have been written by an evangelist or an apostle. At the present day, these admitted irregularities are an element indispensible to every serious discussion respecting the nature and extent of the divine inspiration to be met with in the sacred volume.