[160] This may seem to contradict Genesis xx. 15, and xxi. and xxvi. various verses, but compare with this the Encyclopædia Biblica article Philistines.
[161] So this name should be spelt in English. It is now the fashion among the learned and among the sceptical to spell it Yahwe or Jahveh or Jahve, or in some such fashion. There is a justification for this in the fact that at first only the consonants were written in Hebrew, and then, for reasons into which we will not enter here, the wrong vowels were inserted in this name. But ever since the days of Tyndale’s Bible, Jehovah has been established in English literature as the name of the God of Israel, and it is not to be lightly altered. There is at present a deplorable tendency to strange spelling among historians. Attention has already been called to the confusion that is being accumulated in people’s minds by the variable spelling of Egyptologists, but the tendency is now almost universal among historical writers. In an otherwise admirable little book, The Opening-up of Africa, by Sir H. H. Johnston, for example, one finds him spelling Saul as Sha’ul and Solomon as Shelomoh; Jerusalem becomes Yerusalim and the Hebrews, Habiru or Ibrim. Historians do not realize how the mind of the general reader is distressed and discouraged by these constantly fluctuating attempts to achieve phonetic exactitude. This treatment of old forms has much the same effect as the dazzle-painting of ships that went on during the submarine warfare. It is dazzle-spelling. The ordinary educated man is so confused that he fails altogether to recognize even his oldest friends under their modern disguises. He loses his way in the story hopelessly. The old events occur to novel names in unfamiliar places. He conceives a disgust for history in which no record seems to tally with any other record. Still more maddening and confusing is the variable spelling of Chinese names. A large part of the popular indifference to Chinese history may be due to the impossibility of holding on to the thread of a story in which one narrator talks of T’sin and another of Sin, and both forms mix themselves with Chin and T’chin. A boldly Europeanized name, such as Confucius, is far more readily grasped. Modern writers in their zeal for phonetics seem to have lost their sense of proportion. It is of far more importance not merely to civilization, but to the welfare, respect, and endowment of historians, that the general community should form clear and sound ideas of historical processes, than that it should pronounce the name Jehovah exactly as this or that learned gentleman believes it was pronounced by the Hebrews of the days of Ezra. A day may come in the future for one final, conclusive reform in the spelling of historical names. Meanwhile, it will probably save school teachers of history from endless confusion and muddle if they adhere firmly to the time-established spelling. Yet we have attempted no pedantic classicalism. The reader will find Peisistratus for Goldsmith’s Pisistratus, the Arabic spelling of Muhammad, Kelt for Celt, and Habsburg taking the place of the older Hapsburg.
[162] Figures certainly exaggerated.—G. M.
[163] That is, where is the glory?
[164] But upon the question whether its “Centralization” was the work of Solomon or a much later idea, cp. S. R. Driver, Deuteronomy (Int. Crit. Commentary).—G. W. B.
[165] Estimates of the cubit vary. The greatest is 44 inches. This would extend the width to seventy-odd feet.
[166] But one version of the Creation story and the Eden story, though originally from Babylon, seem to have been known to the Hebrews before the Exile.—G. W. B.
[167] For early Egyptian anticipations of the idea of a Messiah and of the prophetic style, see Breasted’s Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt. A very good book on the Hebrew prophets is W. A. C. Allen’s Old Testament Prophets.
[168] Fletcher H. Swift’s Education in Ancient Israel from Earliest Times to A.D. 70 is an interesting account of the way in which the Jewish religion, because it was a literature-sustained religion, led to the first efforts to provide elementary education for all the children in the community.
[169] Ridgeway’s Early History of Greece has been used here, and Gilbert Murray’s Rise of the Greek Epic.