(3) It is asserted that the Jews took their alphabet from the Babylonians during their captivity. But there are scholars who do not carry the now-known Hebrew square letters beyond the late period of the fourth century, a.d.[319]
The Hebrew Bible is precisely as if Homer were printed, not in Greek, but in English letters; or as if Shakespeare's works were phonographed in Burmese.[320]
(4) Those who maintain that the ancient Hebrew is the same as the Syraic or Chaldaic have to see what is said in Jeremiah, wherein the Lord is made to threaten the house of Israel with bringing against it the mighty and ancient nation of the Chaldæans:
A nation whose language thou knowest not, neither understandest what they say.[321]
This is quoted by Bishop Walton[322] against the assumption of the identity of Chaldaic and Hebrew, and ought to settle the question.
(5) The real Hebrew of Moses was lost after the seventy years' captivity, when the Israelites brought back Chaldaic with them and grafted it on their own language, the fusion resulting in a dialectical variety of Chaldaic, the Hebrew tincturing it very slightly and ceasing from that time to be a spoken language.[323]
As to our statement that the present Old Testament does not contain the original Books of Moses, this is proven by the facts that:
(1) The Samaritans repudiated the Jewish canonical books and their “Law of Moses.” They will have neither the Psalms of David, nor the Prophets, nor the Talmud and Mishna: nothing but the real Books of Moses, and in quite a different edition.[324] The Books of Moses and of Joshua are disfigured out of recognition by the Talmudists, they say.
(2) The “black Jews” of Cochin, Southern India—who know nothing of the Babylonian Captivity or of the ten “lost tribes” (the latter a pure invention of the Rabbis), proving that these Jews must have come to India before the year 600 b.c.—have their Books of Moses which they will show to no one. And these Books and Laws differ greatly from the present scrolls. Nor are they written in the square Hebrew characters (semi-Chaldaic and semi-Palmyrean) but in the archaic letters, as we were assured by one of them—letters entirely unknown to all but themselves and a few Samaritans.
(3) The Karaim Jews of the Crimea—who call themselves the descendants of the true children of Israel, i.e., of the Sadducees—reject the Torah and the Pentateuch of the Synagogue, reject the Sabbath of the Jews (keeping Friday), will have neither the Books of the Prophets nor the Psalms—nothing but their own Books of Moses and what they call his one and real Law.